Algernon (Darth Anyan)'s Reviews > I Am Legend

I was going to rate the book a lukewarm 3 stars, but then I looked once more at the date of publication (1954) and reconsidered. A bit of historical perspective, of literary context elevates this novel to the well deserved 'genre classic' status. At the time Matheson published his science-fiction take on the gothic vampire myth, the market was a lot different from today's oversaturated landscape that has largely trivialized the subject and gave it a curious teenage romance slant. Even bringing in the scientific method of study for the phenomenon and its associated paraphernalia ( the bloodsucking, the garlic, the cross, the wooden stake, the fear of light, the sleeping underground, the bullet invulnerability) was probably a novel approach to a dusty theme:

Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passe, Summers idylls or Stoker's
melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer's mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century.

I didn't much care for the prose: it is concise and clear in its presentation of the main themes but I found it lackluster and unconvincing when it tried to delve deeper into emotional intensity for the main character. I could also complain about the lack of action, but I believe this is more a novel about ideas than a high octane action thriller. To finish with the grumbling, I would have liked a more rigorous attempt with the scientific speculations. Most of the ideas are sound, but the way they are fitted together seems fishy, with some of the argumentation incomplete. Let me give you a few examples :
- vampires are destroyed by sunlight, yet when they are hidden in deep cellars and dark places during the day they are still handicapped
- the transmission is supposed to be airborne, yet two other theories are given equal importance : direct contact with open wounds and insect bites (mosquitoes)
- bullet wounds are instantly healed (didn't they have exploding ammo in 1954?) yet knife cuts are still bleeding
- the disease affects the brain, but in a curious way : speech is unimpeded yet the use of tools is lost and social interaction is lost.

The last one is the one I struggled with the most. Other reviewers noticed also that the monsters are closer in behaviour to zombies than to classic vampires. Cesar Romero cites the book as a primary source, Stephen King alsao makes reference to it.

On the positive side, two aspects of the novel stand out and will probably come to define it for me in later years as the actual details of the plot will fade from memory:
- the psychological pressure of being the last man on earth : Richard Neville is utterly alone, he has nobody to turn to, has lost his wife and kid in horrible circumstances, yet he must find the resources inside himself to go on living from day to day. His heavy drinking, his episodes of paranoid depression and self destructive rage are painfull to watch, as are his efforts to organize his daily routines with checklists and his obsession in hunting down his afflicted neighbours when they are incapacitated during the day. The episode of the feral dog is probably the best written part of the whole novel.
- the implications resulting from the demotion of humanity from the top of the food chain, something that I have remarked upon in another classic I read earlier this year (The Day of the Triffids). Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man. exclaims Neville towards the end of the novel, when he realizes that the monster from the fairytales is in fact himself. The future of the human race might well be carried on by people with wings or by people who use photosynthesis instead of eating solid food or by vampires who drink blood and go out only at night.

[edit] for spelling