I Am Legend - Softcover

Matheson, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031286504X ISBN 13: 9780312865047

Publisher: Orb Books, 1997

Synopsis

Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman, and child on Earth has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood.

About this title

Review:

It seems strange to find a 1954 vampire novel in Millennium's "SF Masterworks" classic reprints series. I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presents vampirism as a disease whose secrets can be unlocked by scientific tools. The hero Robert Neville, perhaps the last uninfected man on Earth, finds himself in a paranoid nightmare. By night, the bloodthirsty undead of small-town America besiege his barricaded house: their repeated cry "Come out, Neville!" is a famous SF catchphrase. By day, when they hide in shadow and become comatose, Neville gets out his wooden stakes for an orgy of slaughter. He also discovers pseudoscientific explanations, some rather strained, for vampires' fear of light, vulnerability to stakes though not bullets, loathing of garlic, and so on. What gives the story its uneasy power is the gradual perspective shift which shows that by fighting monsters Neville is himself becoming monstrous--not a vampire but something to terrify vampires and haunt their dreams as a dreadful legend from the bad old days. I Am Legend was altered out of recognition when filmed as The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. Avoid the movie; read the book. --David Langford

Review:

"The most clever and riveting vampire novel since Dracula." --Dean Koontz

"I think the author who influence me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson. Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me." --Stephen King

"One of the Ten All-Time Best Novels of Vampirism." --Fangoria

About this edition

• Publisher: Orb Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 031286504X
• ISBN 13: 9780312865047
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320