I Am Legend by Richard Matheson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of I Am Legend
Book Review: Great Story
Summary: 5 Stars
I just finished the book this morning and followed it up with a screening of the movie. Both were great in their own ways. If you're used to readiing non-fiction and you're looking for a good fiction book to let your mind run free, this book is it. Easy read with short chapters that entice the reader to keep going. Real page-turner. Ensure to treat yourself to the movie as well. Awesome movie to see in the theatre.Book Review: Great book and literature
Summary: 5 Stars
It is perhaps the greatest novel written on human loneliness. It far surpasses Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe in that regard. Its insights into what it is to be human go far beyond genre, and is all the more surprising because, having read his short stories- which range from competent but simplistic, to having classic Twilight Zone twists (he was a major contributor to the original tv series) there is nothing within those short stories that suggests the supreme majesty of the existential masterpiece I Am Legend was aborning.
Not only is it more than a horror or sci fi tale, it is more than just a post-apocalyptic work as well. It is (written in 1953, and published in 1954) a far more subtle allegory on the McCarthyism of the day, as well the rigid conformity of the 1950s leading to the cultural sterilization and death of the masses. Compared to such filmic fare from that decade, as On The Beach- or its written source, or even The World, The Flesh, The Devil, it stands even higher because criticism from either side of the spectrum, politically- the idle and gullible Left and the vicious and pandering Right- was generally heavy-handed and obvious. Even when compared to later works, some with direct debts, like George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead, or those intriguing alternative visions to the end of the world- Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe Of Heaven (another great apocalyptic novel) or the 1985 New Zealand film The Quiet Earth, I Am Legend stands alone with its relentless focus on the self, and the relation to things exterior.
It deconstructs the vampire myth with modern methods, attempting to explain many of its legendary aspects with science- such as why non-Christian vampires would fear the cross- they don't, why a stake kills a vampire but not a bullet- a stake allows corrupting air into the bodily glue of a vampire (although the silver bullet myth is untouched), why vampires can metamorphose into bats or wolves- they can't, why some vampires turn to dust at death- their already long-dead bodies instantly decompose while living vampires' bodies don't, why mirrors repel them- psychological traumas, and a number of others....a mark of any enduring work of art is its continued, and renewable, relevance through time. A half a century on Neville himself emerges as another sort of figure of the Right- not as the Van Helsing-like McCarthy, but the solipsistic, indolent corporate fat cats and paranoid, self-pitying Goddists of the Bush era. Like the modern Right believes itself to be, he is besieged in a redoubt, fending off the mindless drones of blood and hedonism (the harlot vampires `posing like lewd puppets in the night'), even as he is anachronized. He joys in small victories. He loses himself in an idealized past, fortifies himself with the remnants of a lost glory (Classical music), lashes out at his enemies with no regard to differences, and that some of them are far more like him than he admits, and loses himself in fantasies of violence and sex, not unlike the Timothy McVeigh crowd.
Many questions remain at tale's end: Why did the New Breed have to wait so long to come and get Neville? Was Neville really the last man on earth, or just in LA, or his part of LA? Why were the dead and living vampires so dumb- even Neville queries why they didn't simply set his house on fire?
We'll never know, and why should we? Have we been enlightened, entertained? Yes. That's all that a work of art need do. Too many modern writers go overboard with masturbatory detail, thinking that good writing consists of the curlicues of minutia, squared! The idea being that detailed boredom is better than plain old boredom. My wife has complained of passages in the novel Cold Mountain where the author, Charles Frazier, spends pages describing the details of Civil War weaponry, yet his characters are utter stereotypes. He doesn't get it. Matheson did in I Am Legend. There are gaps in the science of I Am Legend- they were apparent in 1954, and some of the science is even more manifestly dated now. But, it's still plausible, if not as real science fiction, certainly as fantasy, and truly as allegory, and the book's real raison d'etré. Yet, a work can be wholly fantastical and succeed if its tale grips and its characters connect. Plausibility gives way to the motive- in both senses of what drives the tale and what the style accomplishes in doing so.
That all said, I have no hesitation claiming that I Am Legend is easily one of the ten best novels I have ever read- right up there with Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and a few arguments over a tale or two from William Kennedy and some others.
And yet, somehow, I am still drawn to the Vincent Price interpretation of the Robert Neville character (called Robert Morgan in The Last Man On Earth), and my sonnet Vincent Price In The Drapery Folds, for that is where our deepest terrors lie- in the mundane, in the human tendency to see a curtain rustle and expect some ghost or nosferatu to be its cause, rather than a stray breeze. This is why `the divine chaotics of wish and snowflake' is so essential to science fiction and horror. It is the within, admixed with the without, however briefly (for snowflakes are amongst the most ephemeral things in the macro-world), where horror spawns. Matheson knew it, and I Am Legend is a perfect snowflake, whose beautiful fears are forever frozen in words.
Book Review: Great read
Summary: 5 Stars
Not at all what I expected. I read the book in preparation for the movie - now I'm even more interested to see how the film version is handled. Great, fast read - easily done in one sitting. This version of the book is about 1/2 short stories after the I Am Legend story.Book Review: Great story
Summary: 5 Stars
This story is almost completely different from the movie. The basic idea is the same, but the actual movie interpretation is a departure from the original story. Which is fine with me, I think the book and the movie are both great. The book was written a long time ago, and is more of a short story than anything at only about 160 pages. The movie was great, too. As usual, when Hollywood takes a book and turns it into a movie they use a lot of poetic license. If you want to kill a couple of hours, read this. You won't be disappointed.Book Review: Great story, but only half the book?
Summary: 3 Stars
I thought this was a great story, well laid out with a good pace. There weren't too many lulls or too much action. I can't compare to the movie because I haven't seen it. The only disappointing thing about this book is that the I Am Legend story only takes up the first half, so just when you think things are getting exciting, the story ends! The rest of the book is filled with short stories by the author that have nothing to do with I Am Legend.