Plot Summary
The population has been destroyed by vampires. Robert Neville is seemingly the last man on Earth, immune to vampirism. During the day he seeks out and kills sleeping vampires. At night he holds up in his home while they wait eagerly outside for him.
Review
The author writes in a very redundant manner. A great deal of pages of the story are dedicated to Neville's love of whisky. Apparently he's an alcoholic. If you remove all the references to him drinking whisky and throwing, breaking or slamming down his glass the book would be much shorter. Apparently, that's pretty much all he does in the evenings. Drink whisky and battle his anger management problems. I didn't really enjoy the story much. I get that being isolated and lonely for so long has warped Neville's mind a little but he's a really miserable character. I wasn't a fan of the writing style either. Too much time was spent on the boring details of inaction. There were a few places where something exciting happened but it didn't really make the story much more enjoyable. I think the hype behind this book over exaggerates. Maybe it played a decent role in the zombie/vampire genre but the redundancy bored me.
Spoiler Review
The book goes into detail on how stakes, crosses, garlic and mirrors work to harm the vampires but in a very explain the plot way. Like he's literally explaining it to another person verbally. The book mentions his experiments to find out this information briefly but doesn't go into detail of his thoughts. The explanation is very straightforward. It's basically all mental. The vampires mentally think they're supposed to be afraid of those things, so they are but Jewish vampires wouldn't fear a cross. The stakes work by keeping wounds open so that the air kills them, I guess. So he doesn't have to stake the heart. Any stab wound left open would do the trick. I guess they heal really fast so bullets don't work. They describe it as throwing something in wet cement. It doesn't really explain why during the day they are in a sleeping coma so deep he can literally drag them out of their houses and throw them into the sun to die. But I guess it makes killing them during the day super easy since they can't be woken up while the sun is out.
Eventually Neville meets a woman out in daylight. After chasing her down, kidnapping her and forcing her to his home, he spends the whole time questioning and mistrusting her back story and her motives. Even when he shoves garlic at her and she reacts the way a vampire would he still doesn't know that she's infected which to me was a dead giveaway. Then when he finds out she is infected, she knocks him out and runs off. Also, the short time they have together suddenly makes her care about his safety for some reason so she warns him to leave. Apparently, there are a different group of infected that have vaccines to help them function in sunlight and not be full mindless blood thirsty vampires. They plan to rebuild society and exterminate all the feral vampires. Neville is the only man left of a dead race and they intend to kill him too for murdering their brethren. All of this is told in a literal explain the plot letter that she leaves him. I didn't really like being spoon fed the plot. And I honestly don't see why she would suddenly care about his safety at all. She was sent to spy on him and find out what he knew. Somehow their short conversation got her to empathize with him. I'd rather experience it through events and observations but the book was very straightforward with explanations.
I did like when the book went into Neville's back story about how his wife and daughter started becoming ill when it all first started happening. That made him more human and likeable. It kind of rounded out his character some but they didn't go into enough detail on that. Overall, I'd say the book was a let down.
Besides I Am Legend, the book also contained several short stories. They range from just a few pages to twenty or thirty. I may as well review them. The one thing they all have in common with I Am Legend is the redundancy. The same sentences and phrases are listed over and over again in all the stories. It makes for a pretty boring read. Almost all of them are open to interpretation so there's no real conclusive ending. I normally wouldn't mind it but the reads are so dull and uninteresting it kind of makes the stories pointless and unsatisfying. It was honestly kind of painful to get through the whole book.
Buried Talents
A man (death I think) goes to a carnival and plays a game where he has to toss ping pong balls into a gold fish bowl. He wins so many times the guy in charge of the game kicks him out. Then the man leaves and the man in charge of the game has a pain in his chest. I'm guessing he either had a heart attack or was stabbed by the man or something. The whole story was annoying. The man in charge of the game kept saying the same phrase over and over, like 50 times. "Toss a ball into the fishbowl. Win a prize. There's nothing to it." It was one of the shorter stories and if you took all the redundancy out it would probably only be like 2 pages. Pointless and stupid.
The Near Departed
A man goes to a funeral home to make arrangements for his wife. He says, "She has to have the best." a whole bunch of times in Matheson's trademark style of writing. Then he reveals he plans to kill her after he leaves the funeral home. This story was less than 2 pages long. It read kind of like a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark story.
Prey
A woman buys her boyfriend a hunting doll for his birthday. The doll comes alive and tries to murder her. She destroys the doll but the spirit inside the doll takes over her instead. This one was a straight up scary story. But it wasn't very scary. She just kept running all over the house. It was like the author was trying to fill pages by just having her run from one room to the next and close the door until the doll could get in at her. Not scary and pretty boring.
Witch War
A group of girl witches help defeat an invading army with their powers. That's it. This story is 3 pages long and the sentences are very fragmented. Next.
Dance of the Dead
Honestly, I have no idea what this story is about. A bunch of kids go driving to a concert I think and do a bunch of drugs. Then I guess there's like a reanimated corpse dancing on stage or someone being tortured on stage or something. I don't really know. It could also all be a hallucination since they're all on drugs. This was by far the dumbest story of the lot. It was written very poorly as well, to the point where I found it almost unreadable. He put a bunch of made up slang words in the story that I don't know what they mean. Plus a ton of references to Popeye for some reason. This story was terrible. The worst one in the book. An agonizing waste of time.
Dress of White Silk
This one is told from the first person narrative of a little girl who can't speak proper English or in complete sentences, so you can imagine what a mind sore reading it was. The whole story is fragmented sentences. Thankfully it was only 3 pages. She wants to play with her mom's dress but her grandmother doesn't want her to. She invites a friend over and they go to play with the dress. The friend doesn't like the dress and makes fun of a picture of her mom so she... eats her? I think she's a vampire or something.
Mad House
I actually liked this story. It was one of the better ones in the book. I man with anger management problems is separating from his wife. He takes his anger out on the house and the house in a way sends his angry energy back at him causing him to slip on the rug and bump his head, stab himself with a pencil, cut his finger on a chipped mug, fall out of his chair and hit his head, etc. Basically his anger and negative energy gets absorbed into his house and comes back at him. Either that or he's just crazy and hurting himself. It's open to interpretation. There's another message in the story. The man becomes resentful for not being able to live his dream as a writer and blames it on settling down with his wife. "A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth." I think a lot of people can relate to that. This story was written in 1952 and still rings true today.
The Funeral
A vampire wants to hold a proper funeral for himself. He invites all his vampire friends to the service. The mortician is forced to attend and fears for his life the entire time. He passes out as a vampire looms over him. The next day more vampires come to book him for the same services. It's unclear if he was bitten the night before. It was pretty to the point but it was so short it was kind of strange that time was spent trying to characterize all the vampires that came to the funeral.
From Shadowed Places
A woman whose fiance is under a voodoo curse calls her witch doctor friend to come and lift it. This was completely awful and nonsensical. It just throws in some stereotypes about voodoo. The man is in pain and throwing a fit because of the curse. The woman calls her father over first for some reason and then calls her witch doctor friend. Lifting the curse involves dancing around naked and sex. It was one of the longer short stories and incredibly drawn out and stupid.
Person to Person
A man hears a phone ringing in his head every night until he finally decides to answer it and then begins having conversations with his subconscious or maybe it's supernatural. I actually liked this story at first. It was in interesting concept and kind of creepy. But then it just goes all over the place. First you think it's the guy's subconscious and he's just crazy and I guess I still think that. But it tries to offer various explanations and scenarios. First, it might be a government experiment, then it might be an inventor, then it might be a ghost, then it goes back to being the guy's subconscious again. The end is kind of open to interpretation but I guess the evil part of him takes over. All of these short stories are completely forgettable.
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