I Am Legend

Its a great read

Many reviewers have described the greatness of this story and its influence on modern writers. I wanted to offer my viewpoint as a reader who had seen the movie first. I initially avoided the book because I felt that the movie, while entertaining, was shallow with an uninteresting story. However, the positive reviews finally convinced me to give it a shot and I am glad that I did. The character portrayed by Will Smith is a brilliant man who is the cause of the epidemic and also the eventual savior of the human race. The character from the book is a much more interesting and relatable one. He is just an average man who struggles to survive. Not only with the vampires, but also to motivate himself to complete the menial tasks required for his daily survival. The vampires portrayed in the movie are superhuman killing machines completely devoid of any perceivable intelligence. In contrast, the books portrayal of the vampires is much more interesting. They retain many of their human qualities, including their intelligence, personalities, and physical capabilities. This allows for interactions far more interesting than those found in the movie. The conclusion found in the movie is very unsatisfying. It serves as a confirmation of the womans belief that God had directed her actions, portends the rebirth of human civilization, and illustrates the triumph of the human spirit against all odds. All very common themes that deliver a boring result. The books conclusion deviates drastically from the movies. I dont want to ruin the ending, but I will say I found the final realization the main character is forced to accept very interesting and thought provoking. I encourage anyone to read the book regardless of their feelings on the movie. The book provides a deeper story and a much different take on the vampire genre than the one presented in the movie.

The movie certainly falls short of such a great novel. I enjoyed the details provided by Richard, the science involved to try to explain the myth. Completely recommended!

So the biggest thing to know before you buy is that only the first half of the book is I Am Legend. The other half is a collection of short stories. Just keep that in mind because it’s not really promoted correctly. That being said, I Am Legend is a harrowing tale of survival and the fragility of the human psyche when met with absolute isolation. I highly recommend for fans of horror and sci-fi alike. The writing also felt surprisingly modern for having been written in the 50’s.

Richard Mathesons I Am Legend is a short story about a man named Robert Neville, the last living human on the planet. To complicate things, due to a bacteria there are now vampires running amok who know where he lives. By day he hunts the vampires and kills them while they sleep, by night he inebriates himself and holes up in his house. He finds a dog, and another survivor, but both feed the fire of despair, loneliness and inebriation. And by day the legend grows. Matheson weaves a compelling and frightening tale, and the emotions of Robert Neville are felt by the reader. The ending offers a wonderful twist, and the original story is far better than the recent Will Smith film of the same name. I Am Legend is such an influential story that it almost single-handedly invented the vampire/zombie apocalypse genre that is so prevalent in modern cinema. This specific omnibus also features ten other short stories. A reader unfamiliar with Matheson may pass over them, or read them expecting very little compared to the titular story, but reading them will quickly change the readers mind. Several of the short stories are wonderfully frightening, and they all offer a horrific twist at the end. Highlights include Prey, Madhouse, and Person to Person, although each story is well written and highly entertaining.

This is a fantastic novella from a brilliant writer. It was way ahead of its time and Matheson inspired so many giants in the horror field, including Stephen King. This book in particular is one of the main contributing forces that gave rise to the zombie genre. I wouldnt say this is a literary masterpiece so much as an amazing story that is solidly written. The premise is dazzling and it kept me turning the pages. I will refrain from giving it the fifth star because some of Nevilles thinking got a touch repetitive for me and I was actually a little confused about what constituted a (WARNING, mild spoiler) vampire or another kind of undead type of vampire being that isnt quite a vampire. I honestly cant spoil it too bad because I dont clearly understand that part. One of the things I really enjoyed about this book was that I have seen two film versions of I Am Legend and this still felt original. I think its because the main character is a truly human character. We get a front row seat to those flaws in the book and we get to do it as he battles vampires from a last man on earth perspective. It was a fun read. I will try more of Mathesons written work. (He also wrote many screenplays.)

I Am Legend is an amazing story describing a plague that turns the entire world into Vampires, with the exception of one man, who spends the rest of his life simply existing and fighting to maintain his life by killing vampires. It is a very interesting story and I was intrigued by the day to day events the protagonist goes through and the effect the plague has on his sanity. The storytelling is not chronological and jumps right into things, with the protagonist recalling how the plague started and events that happened before it became full blown. The story is amazing and I was very intrigued at how Mattheson can make simple day to day chores interesting. Its an amazing concept and doesnt seem dated at all, even though the story was written over 50 years ago (it takes place in the future of 1970). My main problem with this book was that it ended halfway through. Apparently its a collection of short stories, and I Am Legend only takes up about 170 pages. I read about half of the other stories and they are okay, but nothing too good and I lost interest quickly. Some are a few pages and some are several chapters. I got bored with them quickly and theyre pretty much your typical science fiction from the 50s, although some were written later. I do think the I Am Legend story alone is worth the price of the book.

I really liked the book. It is a quick and entertaining read - especially for being written in 1954. Im not really in to vampires, but this isnt about vampires. Its about a man who is the last man on earth and hes trying to deal with being alone, and trying to figure out what has happened to the rest of his race. Id recommend this to anyone looking for some light summertime reading There are periods when Nevilles coping with his solitary existence - sometimes he drinks himself into a haze and other times he just zones out for months at a time. It reminded me of Cast Away when Tom Hanks was just dealing with being all by himself. It is interesting to read and to get inside the head of a charater like that. Cast Away had over 40 minutes of silence, but in I am Legend you a exposed to the inner thoughts of the survivor. I can only imagine what it would do to a man - but it sure makes for good reading...

First and foremost, this isn’t a novel about vampires so much as it is a novel about loneliness. Robert Neville is isolated for years without any outside contact as the vampire hoard lurked outside his door. The shifts in his mood between apathy, anger, depression, desperate hope, and at times seeming madness and cruelty made his character feel real and believable. The chapter about the dog was so human it was painful. I thought that Neville’s exploration and experimentation in order to understand what the vampires were exactly and how the world was taken so swiftly was interesting. I appreciated the scientific elements that tried to explain well established tropes about vampires, either explaining how they could be possible or separating the ones that were no more than superstition. Many of the assumptions made in the novel were actually reasonable. The experiments that he carried out on those afflicted with vampirism, both alive and dead, made him a monster. The glee with which he executed or experimented on vampires showed his devolution from human to something else. This is where the novel hits kind of a tail spin. I get where the author is going with the evolution of humanity and how moral Neville’s thirst for knowledge and understanding was, but I feel like the novel got a little bit contrived around the end. Most of the novel was spent wondering where it was going, seeming just a bit confused and lacking any real direction. This made the second half of the novel feel forced and left me feeling like I had whiplash. Even so, I Am Legend stands as a classic because it was influential in the development of the zombie genre and the concept of a world wide apocalypse caused by the spread of disease and I can completely understand why. Even though the affliction is officially branded vampirism and explains vampire lore, the creatures in the novel are different from the types of vampires one is used to from other works of fiction and I found it refreshing.

The book and the movie share only a few details in common. The most obvious shared attribute is the title. The differences are almost staggering; Los Angeles/New York, Caucasian male/African-American male, blue collar/white collar, etc. The story is roughly 160 pages long, although there are ten short stories that follow: Buried Talents, The Near Departed, Prey, Witch War, Dance of the Dead, Dress of White Silk, Mad House, The Funeral, From Shadowed Places, and Person to Person. If you are purchasing the book because you like the movie you may feel cheated that the movie is merely based on the book, rather than a direct cinematic interpretation. The book is a great (and a quick) read, told by the perspective of Robert Neville, a man feared to be the sole survivor of the human race. The beginning, however, seems to be drawn out and the word choice is less than sophisticated. Thankfully, as the story progresses so does the word choice. If you love stories based on the appeal of the last man, or on the decline of society, then this book would be to your liking. Matheson also takes a new spin on vampire lore, which was one of the reasons this book appealed to me (the other being that it was a required text for a class). Although better vampires stories exist, this book is worth the read for any vampire enthusiast and highly recommended.