I Am Legend - "Come out, Neville!"

I Am Legend really surprised me.

I actually thought it was a zombie novel involving a guy going around with a shotgun shooting said zombies in the head. This assumption might have something to do with the fact that there is a movie version starring Will Smith. But what it turned out to be was a masterfully written piece of high science fiction with a really strong psychological element. It tells the story of Robert Neville, the very last human being on Earth following a vampiric epidemic. He seals his house with garlic, which is besieged by mocking vampires that try to goad him outside so that they can eat him. Then, when the sun comes out, he goes outside and kills as many as he can find.

It's very short, clocking in at 170 pages, but it's incredibly engaging. Neville is perhaps the loneliest man ever conceived, living in a hellish world without anyone to speak to and nothing to do but brood upon the death of his wife and futilely research the causes of the plague. It's an incredibly layered and sad story that I would recommend to more or less anyone.

Plot discussion after the jump...


So when I was about fifty pages into the book, I messaged Andres on MSN and said that I would just kill myself if I were in Neville's situation. It's pretty telling that he didn't object at all, but instead just asked how I would do it (I would use fire to deny my blood to the vampires, while he would just hurl himself off a building).

I'm not a big fan of the idea of suicide, but the situation Neville is in just more than any one person could be expected to bear. Matheson has him kill his own wife, resort to alcoholism and go on frenzied vampire killing rampages. At one point, Neville tries to befriend a stray dog (the only living thing he can find), slowly offering it food and cultivating a friendship only to have it die in his arms. The intense loneliness is just too much to bear and it really made me wonder about what kind of mental state the author was in when he wrote this. It was so immersive that I even found even myself feeling terribly alone and isolated, with a lurking feeling of despair ever at the edges.

Yet somehow, Neville lives on in these conditions, in a sort of state of emotional detachment and numbness. And you never really get to understand why that is, beyond his sort of Darwinian need for self-preservation. He's not religious at all and he doesn't seem to have any serious hopes of ever finding a cure to the plague or even of finding any other survivors. He just sort of exists and Matheson does a fantastic job of showing the horrible weight on the man's shoulders.

A fair portion of the book is dedicated to Matheson's scientific investigation into the vampiric plague and this is where the book shows its age. The plague is a bacterial parasite, which is spread through spores carried in the wind and which feeds on human blood while turning its victims into bulletproof undead monstrocities that are allergic to garlic. I... I don't think bacteria, no matter how supercharged by a nuclear war, can really do all that. But oh well, I guess that was as good a way to make 'scientific' vampires as any back in the 1950s, so I don't fault Matheson for it. The way he presents these facts certainly shows that he put a lot of thought into them.

The big twist of the book is that some of the vampires get their minds back and set about rebuilding society and that all the Vampires Neville has been slaughtering have actually been 'people' in the new society. This I didn't really like... Neville's realization that he had become a predator or 'legend' to these Vampires that he was killing by daylight struck me as a bit fainthearted... a surrender to the plague, if you will.

But then I got thinking that perhaps all he was looking for throughout the novel was an excuse to die. He didn't want to just off himself and give in to despair, but he had no will to live and would readily embrace the first semi-dignified death he could find. Being executed as a murderer in a society of vampires was the first opportunity that came his way and he jumped at it.

An incredibly nuanced portrayal of human psychology, most certainly... the means really do matter just as much as the ends, don't they? But, needless to say, it's also an incredibly sad one.