I Am Legend was, of course, not the first vampire
novel, nor even the first popular entertainment revolving around those other
undead creatures, the zombies.
But the publication of the novel by Richard Matheson in 1954 catalyzed
fears of an apocalypse gathering force in that early nuclear period. It told
readers they were right to be afraid, because monsters were right outside their
door.
The premise of I
Am Legend is fiendishly clever: the last man on Earth holding out against
vampiredom. But the source of the horror is not a Dracula-like single powerful
figure, but a horde of them, as much victims themselves as victimizers.
Bacteria spread in the fallout of a cataclysmic war has led to a plague, and,
consequently, a need for blood.
It’s possible, then, to read this as a dystopian
horror tale, as if George Orwell had written a horror tale. Like Orwell’s
Winston Smith, Matheson’s Robert Neville becomes a rebel against the
established order; and, feeling terribly alone, he latches onto someone who is
seemingly like himself, a secret sharer—as Smith did to Julia and O’Brien in 1984.
Even while it brought apocalyptic themes to vampire
fiction, Matheson’s creatures bear more than a little resemblance to the
zombies that populate George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead as well as the current TV series The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. He is, then, a
huge part of the American cultural landscape, even if many viewers are unfamiliar
with his name.
Though set in the mid-to-late 1970s, roughly 20 to
25 years after its composition, the novel alludes to the by-now-distant
American past. One of the avenues named here is “Cimarron Street,” as if
Southern California is reverting to its Wild West origins—one that is,
literally in this case, survival of the fittest.
Matheson masterfully sets the scene in the first
half of the book, revealing Neville’s all-too-necessary self-sufficiency (he makes stakes and boards up his house every night, but must take extra
care with his teeth, as there are no more dentists) and loneliness (he not only
mourns the death of his wife and daughter, but has taken to drink to blot out
the memory of killing his wife to keep her from turning into one of the
undead). Likewise, Matheson sympathetically depicts Neville’s attempt to
befriend and save a stray dog.
However, the novel weakens when Neville encounters a
female for the first time in three years. I suppose that loneliness and the
physical need for a woman are enough to make him put aside his normal
suspicions, but a reader can guess where this is leading in no time. (I found
it in interesting that this woman, Ruth, bears the same name as Matheson’s wife!)
Moreover, Neville’s attempt to explain the
scientific sources of the horror besieging him inevitably slow down the
narrative, even as it thrusts horror fiction in a new direction.
Still, Matheson’s style is lean and athletic without
being schlocky, and he thinks through how the quotidian nature of human life is
thoroughly upended by these apocalyptic events. And in Neville, he has created
an all-too-human character—not a superhero, nor even a scientist, but an
ordinary man afflicted with anguish and remorse even as he comes face to face
with the existential nature of the horror that confronts him daily (“How
quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough”).
One of the novel’s late, indelible scenes finds
Neville in a library, alone, reading up on the biological disaster that gave
rise to the howling beasts who constantly scream for his blood. Matheson pays
tribute here to literature, the ultimate—and precarious—zenith of civilization:
“He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head
slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the
scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had
no power to save men from perishing.”
Few greater tributes to his work were offered than
by Stephen King, who cited him as the great influence on his own work. That tip
of the hat is especially noteworthy when one considers that Matheson (who died
in 2013) was part of a celebrated group of midcentury fiction and screenwriters
who made a wide impact on horror and science fiction, including Robert Bloch (Psycho), Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, Robert
Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison.
It was a golden age made possible by two divergent
but welcoming media—pulp magazines and network TV—and Matheson made his mark
with sharp-eyed observations on the sterility of midcentury American culture
and the fragility of human life in the atomic age, through teleplays for Rod
Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Night Stalker, and Steven
Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie thriller, Duel,
as well as short stories such as “The Creeping Terror,” a biting satire on
the spread of the culture of his state, California, around the country.
Originally, I bought I Am Legend over a decade ago, in anticipation of the Will Smith
adaptation about to be released. Partly because of poor reviews, I never got around
to seeing the movie, nor the prior version of the novel, The Last Man on Earth, released in 1971.
Perhaps it’s just as well:
for all his own skill in writing for the large and small screen, Matheson
allowed readers like me, through the magic of his own words rather than images, to
create horror in their own imaginations.
