Off the Shelf: I Am Legend
Off the Shelf is when we talk about books we've read lately. A book is a really antiquated thing that people pretend to like when they want to sound smart, which fits the goal of this website quite nicely.
The vampires kept climbing onto the roofs of the neighboring houses and jumping over onto his home, so the next day Robert Neville went out and burned down all the adjacent houses on his block. That’s on the second page of I Am Legend. This book isn’t messing around.
As a society, we’ve finally outgrown our desire for vampire books, and for good reason. There weren’t a lot of original ideas sitting in that section of the bookstore, and the few objects of inspiration that did emerge weren’t exactly literary. So to recommend a vampire book seems dubious from the start, but hear this: I Am Legend is fantastic. It’s not Dracula. It’s not Twilight. It’s scary and concise and drag-races its story to the very end of its 160 pages. The last line is an all-timer. Just read it.
I Am Legend has the feel of a book that was released in cultural isolation. It isn’t at all tied to the gothic tradition of the vampire books that preceded it, and it had little influence on the modern fetishist vampire presentation made famous by Twilight. As a singular work, it’s been made into a movie four times, but none of the movies are direct adaptations of the story, and each of them take the plot or setting and twist it into a wildly different interpretation. Even the Will Smith movie of 2007 is barely recognizable as a “based on the book” piece—it’s just too different.
What the book does do is offer a compelling, strangely hard-to-duplicate take on the “last man on earth” scenario. The setup reads as traditional: Our hero, Robert Neville, is by chance immune to a planet-altering plague that turns people into vampires. As far as he knows, he’s the only survivor. He spends his days building preemptive defenses against the horde that assaults his house every night, and after dark, he tries to sleep while scores of vampires do everything they can to kill him.
It’s simple, and the book’s merit lies in how it stays simple. The stakes here are always pretty low and singular—searching for other survivors and finding a cure are relegated to secondary objectives against Neville simply surviving each night—and the resulting narrative reads more like a cat-and-mouse thriller than a classic apocalyptic narrative. Robert goes out each day and tries to gain some ground, and then at night the vampires try to take some ground back. Over and over. This isn’t a story about trying to restart humanity or redeem the world from darkness; it’s a story about a lonely guy, grinding away, trying to figure out why he should keep living. In a small way, it’s powerful.
The other big sell on the book is the depiction of the vampires themselves—they’re the catalyst for all the book’s holy-smokes sit-up-in-bed moments. The infected have classic vampire traits like an aversion to garlic and mirrors and crosses, but otherwise they’re remarkably human, and Matheson milks that for all the creeping horror he can. People who knew Neville pre-plague call out to him by name as he tries to fall asleep, and as the creatures circle the house, they prey on his human instincts to trick him into emerging. The women strike seductive poses. His best friend talks to him. They taunt his more superstitious, ineffective defense strategies. These vampires are effective because they’re smart, and they’re effective because they leave all the camp and drama and capes and bats behind. They are I Am Legend’s most lasting images (save the near-perfect finale).
It’s best to keep this concise. To share more detail about I Am Legend is to spoil many of its best WTF moments. It’s a horror novel about vampires that operates in the trenches. It’s dark and sad and awful, but it achieves moments so raw, so beautiful, that the justification for such a pitch-black story lies in its very quality. It’s rereadable and breakneck, but only takes one pass to remember. It kicks ass, but delivers a troubling beating. You won’t forget it.