I Am Legend by Richard Matheson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of I Am Legend
Book Review: Good book - not like the movie
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't be fooled by the cover. A short story in this book inspired the movie with Will Smith, but it is NOT the same story as the movie. The movie changed the story a lot. Both are very good. There are many other short stories in this book as well.Book Review: Good short stories
Summary: 3 Stars
Well, I picked this book up after the movie came out and everyone was already talking it up. The book is billed as "one of the greatest vampire stories" and while I thought it was good, it wasn't as suspenseful or scary as I had hoped. The novel is very short and ends rather abruptly, and the majority of it is rather tedious. It talks an awful lot about Neville's day to day activities, and the pacing seemed slow, especially for such a short novel. I was irritated by how much liquor and glassware he wasted in the novel, it seemed he was constantly smashing his glass on the floor or the wall. The part with the dog was the best part, really the first time I got in touch with the character. The novel was decent overall, at least for the fact that it seemed much more realistic than the majority of modern vampire stories. If I had read this before all the hype was out, I probably would have liked it more. I just was expecting something else.
I actually enjoyed the other short stories in the book better. They were strange and often very confusing, with all the same outcome: is this person crazy, or is this stuff really going on? Matheson does a good job at making the implausible seem real. The book was worth it just to read a few of those short stories.
Book Review: Good stories
Summary: 4 Stars
As expected, "I Am Legend" was not like the movie. It was a little confusing (living vampires? dead vampires?), but was still thought-provoking. The other short stories in the volume were a little dated, but still good stories.Book Review: Good writing but a disappointing read
Summary: 1 Stars
I should preface this review by saying that I did watch the movie version before delving into Matheson's original story and this most likely skewed my opinion of the book because my mind was invariably searching for comparisons between the two as I read.
That being said, I was disappointed with the book because the original Robert Neville that Matheson created was by no means the heroic character that we saw being played on screen by Will Smith's character. Neville, being the last human being left untouched by the vampirus virus on earth by unexplained immunity (and I should mention that this is not a question that is eventually explained by the end of the book), spends much of the story emotionally wallowing in self-pity and physically drowning in glass after glass of whiskey. The author does allow him an introspective personality that eventually attempts to figure out the biological facts of how the epidemic came about, but even this part of the plot lacks the excitement of a usual climax. I'm not so cruel as to reveal the end to anticipating readers that may not have opened their copies of the book yet, but I will say that even the end did not save the flailing story. There is no real resolution to the worldwide problem that Matheson creates and when I finished reading, I realized that for the hundred and something odd pages that I had just read, nothing of substance had actually happened aside from him doing some drinking, research, and the occasional deed towards survival. And, as so many others have mentioned, the story of Robert Neville and his life ends abruptly in the middle of the book. The rest of the book turns out to be a random collection of well-written but disparate short stories that do not seem to connect to the Neville story or to each other in any way. It leaves the reader feeling cheated because right after we leave the seemingly unfinished story of the vampires, we jump into several mystifying stories.
In sum, I believe the storyline was a brilliant idea and could have made a fantastic novel, but this may by the only time that I could ever admit that the movie was better than the book. So those of you who watched it on the big screen and wanted to read the text "just to see", I recommend you stick to Smith.
Book Review: Good writing marred by plot holes and weak ending
Summary: 3 Stars
What's good about this book:
Richard Matheson did a superb job creating the bleak, horrific world that Neville inhabits, as the sole human survivor of a plague that has turned the world into a living nightmare filled with the undead. He does a magnificent job getting into Neville's tortured mind as the vampire slayer struggles to find a way to cure the illness that is the true cause of civilization's demise. You can taste a little of the ordeal the character goes through in his battle to make some sense of his life in a world surrounded by the dead.
What's bad:
The ending. Late in the story Matheson takes it in a completely different direction, abandoning the human versus vampire theme that occupies the first two thirds of the book. He replaces it with an odd, rushed through climax to the story that left me wondering "where did he get that from?"
There are also numerous holes in the story. What, for example, is the difference between a "living" and a "dead" vampire? Why didn't Neville watch the vampire named Cortman as he headed back to his hideout as dawn broke? Why were his final adversaries so hostile, when they knew he had done invaluable research on the infection and might have vital information?
For that matter, why develop the whole story line of Neville studying the vampires from a scientific perspective, when it essentially led nowhere?
And why do stakes succeed where bullets fail, if Neville's theory of the vampire's Achilles' heel is correct? Either one would allow oxygen to get into their systems.
Overall the story impressed me with Matheson's talent as a wordsmith, yet made me feel he didn't think the plot out very well before publishing the story.
If you enjoy good writing then the story is worth reading for that reason alone. But don't expect to put the book down and say "wow, what a great story!" That is, unless you have a penchant for confusing, depressing, implausible finales to otherwise great tales.