I am Legend (review!) - Writers Forum

HippoHead · 03-07-2008, 04:58 AM

I Am Legend Review

Robert Neville is the last man on Earth, but he is far from the last living being. It has been several years since an unknown plague covered the Earth and seemingly wiped out every human, save for Robert. But those humans that died did not stay dead, and have now returned to life as vampires, thirsting for human blood. For Robert’s blood. By day, Robert goes through a strict routine to fortify his home with mirrors, garlic, and nailed-up boards, and hand making the endless amount of stakes needed for his other daily routine — vampire slaying. By night, Robert sits in his home, listening to classical music and drinking himself to sleep while vampires stumble around and call for him to come out.
Fed up by not knowing what caused the plague, and still haunted by the death of his family, Robert finally decides to begin researching what may have been the origin. Though Robert is not a scientific man, he has all the time in the world to become one. He adds a trip to the library to his daily routine, where he finds books on viruses, bacteria, and basic scientific theory. Through this new process of theorizing and study, Robert finds a renewal in his life, and as he comes close to a theory that may stick under securitization, he stumbles across the biggest discovery of all — he may not be the last human alive after all!
Written by Richard Matheson in 1954, I Am Legend has become a legend of it own for the influence it has had on literature and cinema over the past fifty years. Stephen King and Brian Lumley have repeatedly sourced Matheson as inspiration. Ray Bradbury, Fangoria, and Psycho author Robert Bloch shower him with praise. Matheson’s story has been brought to the screen in 1964 as The Last Man On Earth (which in turn influenced the original Night Of The Living Dead), in 1971 as The Omega Man, and now in 2007 as I Am Legend.
Matheson’s tale is as powerful today as it was when it was first published, and as a testament to its longstanding, has aged hardly at all. The exploration of the darker sides of human emotion — loneliness and confusion especially — and the will to survive make this a timeless tale, and the fact that the story takes place long after most technology has become completely obsolete means that Neville’s journey will almost never be dated.
While this is certainly a horror novel by any means, the horror comes not from the external attacks of the vampires, but from the internal tribulations of Neville, and the nightly menaces seem trivial compared to Neville’s mental demons. Matheson takes the reader on Neville’s journey of repetition and routine to keep from going insane. Much of the story is told through Neville’s monologues to himself, as he talks his way through the day, and keeps himself in the present. Only briefly does he think back to the past, which is far too painful for him to revisit for even a fraction of a thought, and any shattered memories that Neville remembers are quickly doused with alcohol and even more detailed repetition.
What makes Neville here so fascinating is that he is just a regular man who has been thrust into an irregular situation. He is no hero, but merely a man who has tapped into mankind’s repressed survival instincts. Sometimes, he is not even a survivor, merely a teetering soul on the brink of madness who is tired of being alone, but too much of a coward to even commit suicide. In one of the saddest moments of the book, Neville discovers that there is a stray dog in his neighborhood. The dog is too scared to trust Neville, yet each day Neville attempts to feed the dog and gain its trust.

HippoHead · 03-07-2008, 04:59 AM

all of his other responsibilities in the hopes of finally winning over the dog, and fantasizes about the dog becoming his dog. This is a man stripped down to his frayed emotional core, and Matheson details Neville’s desperation in frightening detail.
Neville’s understanding of what has happened to the world, which in turn is the reader’s slow understanding, is part of the mesmerizing charm of Matheson’s book. Unlike any of the film incarnations of Neville, here in the original novel Neville is not a scientist and is not actively involved with the plague as it spreads out across the planet. He instead must start from scratch as he analyzes the situation and becomes a self-taught armchair researcher. As Neville becomes more aware, on a scientific level, of what has happened around him, Matheson begins to change his writing to accommodate Neville’s newfound knowledge. Matheson ever so subtly switches from chilling bump-in-the-night scares to a critical analysis of what is making those bumps. The result is an unprecedented explanation for what makes a vampire a vampire, and why the classic superstitions that have become associated with the vampire work as they do.
Matheson isn’t just content with his dissection of the vampire mythos, but also dives head first into an exploration of what legends mean and the associated perception of truth, fear, and understanding based on a majority of a population thinking a certain way. Much like zombies would be used as a tool to explore racial and social issues in the decades to come, Matheson here takes legends and transforms them into a tool to expose the irrational line of thinking of what is not understood and in a minority must be contained and destroyed. For Matheson’s part, it is a purely brilliant way to broach such critical thinking at a time when World War II was not even a decade past and segregation was an everyday fact of life in the United States.
I Am Legend is perhaps one of the greatest novels on vampirism that has been brought to the page. Perhaps only Bram Stoker’s story deserves more praise. What at first may appear to be a horror pulp story to be read under the covers then forgotten is nothing short of an astonishing analysis of not only then-current issues, but an examination that can be re-interpreted and used as a magnifying class for any political or social strife. Cinema may be able to catch a glimmer of what Matheson brought to the page, but the story just cannot be translated to another medium as it stands. I Am Legend remains a classic and essential piece of modern literature for a reason, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Truth-Teller · 03-07-2008, 04:38 PM

I never knew a review could be this boring, Hippo.

Stewart · 03-10-2008, 05:07 PM

Here's mine:

Quote:

I grew up with an interest in vampire stories, working my through the likes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles but, despite forever hearing good things about it, I’d never got around to reading Richard Matheson’s contribution to the canon, I Am Legend (1954). However, with its third big screen adaptation currently in the cinema - and hearing word of a reworked ending - I wanted to go straight to the source before seeing the film in order that my first impressions remain faithful to the book, not to whatever liberties the film-makers have taken.

Talking of impressions, I sort of knew what to expect from the book, but only in a bare bones way: vampires, an element of science-fiction in some form or other, and character who is the last man on Earth. That the novel is held as a masterpiece of science fiction rather than horror interested me and it was to the pictured edition I turned, not wanting the film tie-in because a) these are tacky; and b) Will Smith is on it.

I Am Legend begins as just another ordinary day in the life of Robert Neville, a plant worker from California who would appear to be the sole survivor of an apocalypse seemingly caused by a bacteria that infects the hosts who then go on to show signs of vampirism: aversion to garlic, crucifixes, and daylight; death by wooden stake; a taste for blood:

…no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they didn’t even believe in?

Neville’s days consist of foraging for food, keeping his generator running, staying sober, repairing structural damage to his home, and hunting out the vampires, who retreat to the darkness and slip into a form of coma. On a cloudy day, he stays in. But Neville’s drive to understand what has happened leads to his education in matters such as blood and microscopes:

But, of course, he knew nothing about microscopes, and he’d taken the first one he’d found. Three days later he hurled it against the wall with a strangled curse and stamped it into pieces with his heels.

Then, when he’d calmed down, he went to the library and got a book on microscopes.

At night the neighbourhood vampires gather round his house, the regular mantra of ‘Come out, Neville’, trying to entice him into their clutches, but this is nothing for Neville, who now takes it for granted:

…from a distance they’d thrown rocks until he’d been forced to cover the broken panes with plywood scraps. Finally one day he’d torn off the plywood and nailed up even rows of planks instead. It had made the house a gloomy sepulcher, but it was better than having rocks come flying into his rooms in a shower of splintered glass. And, once he had installed the three air-conditioning units, it wasn’t too bad. A man could get used to anything if he had to.

As the novel progress, his understanding of blood and bacteria grows, making him able to forms conclusions as to what has happened to the world. And if his science is sketchy - I wouldn’t know, though - then it’s only because he’s an amateur. Finally, after months of solitude, he spots a dog wandering in daylight and spends time trying to befriend it, only to discover the true nature of the bacteria, and from there events escalate to the shocking ending that, on reflection, is strangely optimistic.

Throughout I Am Legend Matheson explores the vampire myth from a scientific point of view. Neville reduces garlic, for example, to its chemical constituents to find what offends vampires so. And when tackling other conventions, of the more psychological ilk, questions are asked, such as “what would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross?” It’s to his credit that he doesn’t just accept such traits as staples of the genre and dares to question them, lifting his novel from more pulpy contemporaries.

But vampires aside, its the human angle that takes centre stage in I Am Legend, charting Neville’s passage from man to monster as he goes around by day killing the slumbering vampires. Where, in the Bible Jesus met a man possessed and, on asking his name, was told, “I am Legion, for we are many”, so Matheson inverts this notion where the many see in him a legend, a mythical beast that haunts their numbers.

The novel benefits from Matheson’s style, a straightforward, no frills prose, that is immensely readable, offering up page after page of horrific action coupled with a realistic - seriously! - study of loneliness. In the vampire canon it’s one of the better novels I’ve read, daring to be edgy by explaining a predominantly supernatural subject matter as science. Other vampire novels should be scared of this - it deserves its legend.