Aside from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I’ve never been particularly interested in vampire stories, and even Dracula I think intrigued me mostly because of the historical context and the period detail. I cringed through the first Twilight movie and failed to understand my then tween son’s fascination with what’s been often denounced as the sparkly vampire series. Though I can’t say I’ve ever read a Stephen King book I hated, I wouldn’t count Salem’s Lot among my top ten favorite books of his. Aside from the subject matter, I’ve only recently been introduced to Matheson’s work, and I wasn’t a huge fan of the first book of his I read, Hell House.
I am Legend redeemed Matheson for me. In addition to being beautifully written, it is brilliantly plotted. For me, I very much enjoyed how Matheson conveyed the isolated nature of the Robert Neville’s existence. In spite of the fact that the guy’s confronted on a nightly basis by hordes of the undead, his reaction to the solitude of the daylight hours was more striking, and really helped me get into his head and become fully invested in his character. I was so moved by his loneliness that I cheered when he found a canine companion. When we find out the dog has died in that single, stirring sentence, “In a week the dog was dead,” (Matheson, 110), I had to choke back tears. (This is remarkable only in that I don’t especially like dogs.) I was equally intrigued by the introduction of Ruth near the close of the book, and by his reaction to her. At that point, Neville had been alone so long it seemed most of his animalistic impulses (sex drive, etc.) had practically dissipated, which I thought was a fairly realistic detail.
In addition to Matheson’s depiction of Neville’s hermit like lifestyle, I was also very impressed by how well he interjected scientific detail into the story. Oftentimes, books with scientific terminology and concepts I feel run the risk of being bogged down by the detail. However, Matheson (through Neville’s character) explains the germ theory in laymen’s terms and then seamlessly makes the connection to the “plague” that turned the rest of the world into vampires. I felt this was a very effective demonstration of how to blend genres in the interest of the story.
I definitely saw, in this work, the style that later influenced Stephen King. As I was reading I am Legend, I thought several times that this book was indisputably the forerunner of books like King’s The Shining, from the isolated quality of the work down to the protagonists’ struggles with alcohol.
My only real gripe with this work was that I felt it was too short. I made the stupid mistake of thinking it was a 317 page book as opposed to a 170 page one, and I kept thinking even as I neared the end of the work that we still had plenty of time for Neville to save the world from the threat of vampires/vampire germs and restore order to society. While I recognize that in many cases books in the horror genre don’t have “happy endings” I found the ending of I am Legend to be abrupt. In fact, I kept on reading and finished all of “Buried Talents” before I realized it wasn’t a continuation of the novel. (It would have made for an odd juxtaposition of plots, true, but at that point I was convinced of Matheson’s ability to pull it off.)
On the whole, I felt this to be a thoroughly enjoyable story and I’m glad I had the opportunity to read it.
