Disposable Lit Reviews

TOR, 1995/2007
312 pp.
ISBN 0-7653-5715-1

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By now you’ve read dozens of reviews of the movie, most of which make no more than passing reference to the original novel. So, as turnabout, I present a review of the novel which makes little reference to the movie.

Richard Matheson is himself a legend. Working largely in the rational ’50’s and early ’60’s (though still writing right through today), he almost single-handedly created the modern horror story, one which grounds terrifying events in the world his readers know, replacing antiquarian gothic trappings with the contemporary environment of suburbs and carpooling and walk-up apartments. Think of your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone; odds are good that he wrote it. If there had been no Richard Matheson, there would have been no Stephen King. (More literally, there would have been no Richard Christian Matheson, the next generation of the family who is a well-regarded author of the fantastic in his own right.)

In I Am Legend, Matheson marries Cold War fears of the price of survivalism on the average man with one of the hoariest of horror cliches, even then: The vampire. The story that results is touching, gripping, and honest in a way that spook stories draped in cobwebs can never be.

Robert Neville is an average suburban man. Or he was, when there was a suburb. Before the Plague hit, causing a major public health crisis in the far-flung world of 1976 (22 after the date of composition). Neville is a man who saw his daughter succumb to the mysterious sickness, and was forced by the law to throw her body into the perpetual flame of a cremation pit, built in a vain attempt to stem the tide of the disease. Neville is a man who saw his wife similarly wither and die, and unwilling to commit her to the same fiery erasure, was forced to deal with her again when she came back from the grave for his blood.

And now Neville is, as far as he knows, the last human being on earth, mysteriously immune to the Plague. But he is not alone.

Some the Plague killed outright. Some it turned into ravenous, bloodthirsty creatures with little of their human intelligence left. Some it killed, THEN changed into vampires. And dozens of them — alive or dead but all infected — gather outside Neville’s barricaded house every night, howling and screaming for his blood, led by Neville’s former neighbor and carpool buddy. And inside, Neville tries to block out the loneliness and futility, the stymied physical desires which turn even a flash of filthy female vampire flesh into a spasm of lust.

By night, he hides inside and paces and drinks himself to unconsciousness.

And by day he hunts them in their lairs.

The novel follows Neville from futility to a reawakening of purpose, as the last man alive tries to educate himself and figure out what the leading health authorities of the vanished would could not: What causes the Plague, and what is a vampire? Why do they react to sunlight and garlic and wooden stakes, but not to bullets? Why do they want his blood?

It is a stark novel, one which dangles hope before yanking it away repeatedly, until the reader, like Neville, no longer bothers to hope and instead merely exists with a mission. Little by little, his research and experiment whittle away at the mythic mystique of the vampire, but what remains is still a world empty of rational beings, filled in their place with animalistic id-driven savages. There is no magic bullet.

The one place where the novel falters — and I know I’ll be pilloried for this — is in its conclusion. I won’t indulge in spoilers, but suffice it to say that the ending encompasses a twist that attempts to justify the title. Unfortunately, to my mind, it’s simply too much a spin, encompassing too many new motifs in a tiny fraction of the narrative. There’s setup missing that would have enriched the payoff immeasurably. And I only mention it because one of the chief complaints about the 2007 movie is that the ending wasn’t faithful to the book, as if that were the only major change made in the Hollywood version. (There, that’s the promised “little reference.”)

The novel comes in short at 159 pages, and because our borderline illiterate society nevertheless won’t pay attention to any paperback under an inch thick, the 1995 edition republished to tie in with the movie release includes almost as much again of Matheson’s shorter stories. These serve to prove that the novel wasn’t a fluke in its effectiveness, as tale after tale describes dark horrors in a world of sidewalks and paper routes and bubblegum. Among the stories included here are “Prey,” the basis for the memorable Zuni doll sequence in the 1975 anthology TV-movie Tales of Terror, and “Dance of the Dead,” which was recently adapted (by his son Richard Christian, in fact) for the Showtime series Masters of Horror. Very few qualify as inferior; some will stay with you for days — not because of horrific imagery (or because of that alone), but for the raw emotion convincingly portrayed: Desperation, fear, rage, shame. I wouldn’t be surprised if the new I Am Legend movie starts off a small spurt of big-screen Matheson adaptations, as Hollywood story execs looking for something to exploit rediscover the power the man has been wielding for half a century.