Jonathan Weir, Senior Publicity Manager at Gollancz.
I am Legend by Richard Matheson. Is it horror? Is it SF? Is it post-apocalyptic? When I first read it at the age of 11, I didn’t care. All I knew was that it scared the beejezus out of me, but filled me with a sense of wonder, terror and awe that few books before or since have achieved. I wasn’t scared by its depcition of vampires; humans turned into vampyric monsters not by supernatural means but by a virus (a trope still echoing through the genre today in films like 28 Days Later), nor by its haunting set pieces as the creatures clawed at the boarded up house or whispered Robert Neville’s name in the night.
It tapped most effectively into the thing I feared more than the dark; being alone in the dark. Neville is the last man alive, a stranger in a land that wasn’t his own, no one to talk to but himself, no one to laugh with, no one to love and no one to love him back. Eventually, Neville is the stranger, the outcast, the deviant. He dies alone, horribly aware of his own place in this new world: it’s a world that does not want him and one in which he does not belong.
Matheson’s novel has been an inspiration for such horror legends as Stephen King and George Romero and it can, simply, be read as a great modern vampire novel, but it’s much more than that. It’s about a man who enters this world as no one special, but leaves it a legend. And who of us can say we wouldn’t want that?
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