I Am Legend is a 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel by American writer Richard Matheson that was influential in the modern development of zombie and vampire literature and in popularizing the concept of a worldwide apocalypse due to disease.
Set on Cimarron Street in 1976 Gardena, California, after an apocalyptic war that ravages the land with weekly dust storms, the novel details the life of Robert Neville in the months and eventually years after the outbreak of a pandemic that has killed the rest of the human population and turned infected survivors into "vampires".
During the day, the vampires are inactive, allowing Neville to drive around stabbing them with wooden stakes (since they seem impervious to his gun’s bullets), which causes them to liquefy instantly, and scavenging for supplies.
Suffering from extreme isolation, depression, and alcoholism, Neville determines there must be some scientific reasons behind the vampires' origins, behaviors, and oddly specific aversions, so he gradually researches at his local library, discovering that the root of the disease is probably a Bacillus strain of bacteria capable of infecting both living and deceased ("undead") hosts.
After he painstakingly attempts to win the trust of a stray sickly dog that dies after only a week, Neville, heartbroken, commits himself even more vigorously to his studies.
However, he discovers the bacteria also produce resilient "body glue" that instantaneously seals blunt or narrow wounds, explaining how the vampires are bulletproof.
Lastly, he deduces now that there are in fact two differently-reacting types of vampires: conscious ones who are living with a worsening infection and undead ones who have died but been partly reanimated by the bacteria.
Her note suggests that only the undead vampires are pathologically violent but not those, like her, who were alive at the time of infection and who still survive due to chance mutations.
However, his mind is changed when he watches a group of them annihilate the undead vampires outside his home with fiendish glee, then break down his front door.
All the same, the story could have been an admirable minor work in the tradition of Dracula, if only the author, or somebody, had not insisted on encumbering it with the year's most childish set of 'scientific' rationalizations.Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin described Legend as: a weird [and] rather slow-moving first novel ... a horrid, violent, sometimes exciting but too often overdone tour de force.Anthony Boucher praised the novel: Matheson has added a new variant on the Last Man theme ... and has given striking vigor to his invention by a forceful style of storytelling which derives from the best hard-boiled crime novels.Dan Schneider from International Writers Magazine: Book Review wrote: Despite having vampires in it, [the novel] is not a novel on vampires, nor even a horror nor sci-fi novel at all, in the deepest sense.
Its insights into what it is to be human go far beyond genre, and is all the more surprising because, having read his short stories—which range from competent but simplistic, to having classic Twilight Zone twists (he was a major contributor to the original TV series)—there is nothing within those short stories that suggests the supreme majesty of the existential masterpiece I Am Legend was aborning.In 2012, the Horror Writers Association gave I Am Legend the special Vampire Novel of the Century Award.
[6] One major influence upon Matheson and others of the genre is the Mary Shelley novel, The Last Man, about an immune person surviving in a plague infested world.
With I Am Legend, Matheson instituted the germ theory of vampirism, a take on the old archetype which has since been tackled by other writers (notably, Dan Simmons in Children of the Night from 1992).Although referred to as "the first modern vampire novel", it is as a novel of social theme that I Am Legend made a lasting impression on the cinematic zombie genre, by way of director George A. Romero, who acknowledged its influence and that of its original cinematic adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (1964), upon his seminal film Night of the Living Dead (1968).
[19][20] An unrelated film tie-in was released in 2007 as a one-shot I Am Legend: Awakening published in a San Diego Comic-Con special by Vertigo.
[23][24] In 1964, Vincent Price starred as Dr. Robert Morgan (rather than "Neville") in The Last Man on Earth (the original title of this Italian production was L'ultimo uomo della Terra).
Matheson had no influence on the screenplay for this film,[26] and although the premise remains, it deviates from the novel in several ways, removing the infected people's vampiric characteristics, except their sensitivity to light.