I Am Legend is a post-apocalyptic, vampire novel following the remaining few months of life of the last man on Earth, Robert Neville. I Am Legend has been adapted into several films first into 'The Last Man On Earth' secondly 'The Omega Man' and most recently the straight to DVD film 'I Am Omega' and of course the most successful adaptation to date, starring Will Smith
I AM LEGEND.

I picked Ricahrd Matheson's I Am Legend from the library last week and read bits of it in between reading large chunks of Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel Dracula. I had known that the 2007 film I Am Legend, was based on Ricahrd Mathesons novel for a long time, but could never find the book anywhere so I just gave up trying to find the book and decided to watch the film first, I always like to read the original novel of a film first so I can compare and so I'm not influenced by the film. But I was not at all influenced by the film at all as the film and book were so unlike that they could have been two completely different stories overall.

in this original classic, Robert Neville is described as a blond-haired, blue-eyed, tanned, middle-aged man who has been living alone in the world for five entire months. The rest of the population floundered by vampirism. Neville does all he can to protect himslef from becoming one of them, determination set in his mind to prevent them from acquiring one drop of his blood. He is the only none-vampiric being, he spends his days repairing damages to his home and staking the damned, by night Robert Neville shuts himself away and drinks himself to sleep. Those who hunger for his blood demand him come out, they have forced cellabocy upon him, deprived him of true social contact, removed him of all human elements...Neville is on the brink of insanity, he wants nothing more than for his life to return to normal, for them to leave him alone...how long can the last man on Earth last?

However, in the 2007 I Am Legend film adaptation Robert Neville is portrayed by Will Smith, a completely different character in accordance to physical appearance, yet Will Smith played the part valiantly, making it one of my all time favourite films...I would probably say my most favourite!! The 'vampires' in the film do not appear to have as much humanity as the type that appeared in the original novel, they sleep in an odd circular formation, breath at a formidable rate and have more of a feral appearance to them. The dog which appears briefly in the book is already a companion to Robert Neville and assists Neville in capturing bait for the vampires so he is able to experiment on them. The dog, which is called Sam, has to been killed by Neville due to it turning into a vampiric dog, I actually cried at this scene.

If I'm truly honest, I preferred the I Am Legend film to the book, mainly 'cos it made me cry, and it's hard to make me cry at a film (I've only cried at two films I Am Legend and Marley & Me, both doggy deaths :O) also because it has a much more action-filled, emotional ending. But, nevertheless I'm not reviewing the film, I'm reviewing the book and giving it a four out of five star rating :D ( )

Interesting concept, boring realization. ( )

An excellent post-apocalypse vampire story. The ending is quite shocking and the sense of isolation felt by the central character well put across. A well-deserved classic.

This edition also contains a collection of macabre short stories written over a period of nearly 4 decades in the author's career. Some of them have very similar themes (haunting, personal possession, funeral parlours) and a couple of them fell flat for me. The best of these was probably Prey, where the spirit of a killer African doll attacks and then takes over a woman. ( )

This book is very good. It starts out with Robert Neville has to live with garlic everywhere and keep his house locked. When it becomes night all of the vampires come out. Robert tries to forget about the death of his wife while hunting his neighbor. He is the major character and is static. He is an protagonist and is round. ( )

Matheson is the master of post-apocalyptic fiction. The ultimate enemy of the last man on Earth is not the zombie-like vampires he faces nightly, but his own shattered psyche. And of course, the twist ending will leave you reeling. ( )

This book is as similar to the movie of the same name (with Will Smith) as The DaVinci Code book was to its movie (in other words, not at all).

The book is much darker, much more dated (obvious that it was written in the 50s), and much more "internal". About half the book is a discovery of the main character's mental breakdown. i.e. He spends so much time alone that his own humanity is questionable.

There is a lot of Robert Neville talking to himself or reading books out loud (so the reader will be able to follow the "science")... I guess since he's the last human left, it's not like the story could be told through dialogue so this is the only other way.

There is not nearly enough action to keep the story interesting; and it's so hard to relate to Neville that it's not really a very interesting "character study" either... not sure if this is because he's very "set in his ways" or because it is dated and/or sexist or something... I can't put my finger on why, but the story is just too dry. ( )

Very disappointing. For me, reading this book was a similar to listening to someone like Buddy Holly. Interesting mostly as a precursor to the later works that it influenced. ( )

This was one of the sf books I was weaned on, and one of the best. I have never seen the many mediocre film adaptions, and don't want to spoil those wonderful emotions of nobility and loss and a new age dawning that I get from this book. Given the popularity of all things vampiral, this was the first book (for me) which positioned vampires as a part of humanity. ( )

Brilliant, spare, clean writing with great sense of tension and atmosphere, yet you still deeply empathise with and care about the narrator - far better than the movies this is based on.

I read this book because I thought the previews for the movie starring Will Smith looked interesting. The writing is a bit stark, but I didn't mind that so much. I think the novella is much more cleverly done than the movie. This book also included several of Matheson's short stories; some of them were excellent, while others were dull. ( )

This story is far more bleak than any adaptations made to it. Two or three movies have been made from it. The Omega Man and two version of I Am Legend. This is modern vampire story. A disease has infected the entire planet. The only one not affected is Richard Neville. The plague took away his wife and child, and brought back his wife as a vampire. He must fortify himself to fight the vampires and find a cure for the disease that plagues them. It is a fairly straightforward story. There are no sub-plots or strange turn of events. It is rather bleak. Some of the elements woven into the movie adaptations provide more hope for humanity that this book does. It becomes so bleak that Neville sympathizes with the vampires. The ending is a big twist. ( )

I am Legend
By Jonathan Kepcke
8/18/09
What surprised me the most about “I am Legend” was how different the book was from the movie. The time frames in the book and the movie were totally different. It also seemed that the movie made Robert look like a super hero and the book did not. The premise of the movie was not even the same as the book. I really wanted the two to be a little similar to each other.

The makers of the movie really wanted the audience to think that Robert Neville was a hero and could do anything, compared to the book, it seemed like the author was just telling the story of a man. In the movie, the hardest part for Robert Neville was when he had to kill his own dog because he felt sorry that his dog was suffering from the virus. Unlike the movie Robert Neville in the book did not even own a pet. In the book Robert Neville was a factory worker and he learned about the virus when the plague happened by going to the library. In the movie he was an army man and a scientist. They both had a different mindset of what to do with the infected. In the movie, Robert Neville approached the problem by trying to find a cure, not trying to kill the infected, and he felt guilty when he did. In the book, Robert felt that he had to kill the infected or they would come and try to kill him; in the book, Robert Neville also smoked and drank heavily. I would have to say that I enjoyed the movie Robert Neville more than the book character. I am more interested in a character that seems less realistic. It was more enjoyable to read about a character who was a scientist, an army man, wanted to cure the infected and not kill them. However, the most unfair death in my opinion was the Robert Neville in the book. He had no choice of living or dying. So, that frustrated me more than the death of Robert Neville in the movie.

In the movie every person turned into vampires when a scientist made a cure for cancer and the cure mutated people. Knowing that a man trying to better society killed every one makes me quite fearful knowing that things can go wrong so quickly. On the other hand, in the book there was a plague that came and mutated ever one. It surprised me that nature can mutate and kill off an entire unsuspecting reality. However, the premise that I prefer would be the one in the movie because to me the movie premise makes more sense and is more logical.

It really disappointed me that the time frames were so far apart. In his lonesome, Robert Neville in the novel would listen to old records. In the movie Neville would listen to Bob Marly on his iPod. Sense Robert Neville was a scientist and the movie took place in 2012, he had all the technology that he needed to help the infected. However, the book took place in the 1970’s. So all Robert had was a needle and syringe and a microscope to examine the infected. I would choose the movie because I enjoy reading about things closer to the present rather than the past.

When I first bought “I am Legend” I was most shocked by the fact that the book and the movie were completely different. I didn’t like the time period of the book, set in the 1970’s, compared to the movies time period, 2012. There were two different premises and I disliked the books because it was harder to understand. In the book, Neville was very cold and human like compared to the movie he was very hero like. I enjoy a less realistic, hero like character. I wish the book and the movie were more similar. ( )

Interesting ideas and some cool examination into the survival of man alone. Even the character himself finds it interesting that he keeps surviving. What makes him special that he can just keep living? Not merely from a physical standpoint, but particularly from a psychological standpoint. Even when he's reached deep levels of despair, Neville is capable of digging himself out, or creating a new status quo. Is it mere survival instinct, or a convergence of circumstance that make him uniquely adapted to ... keep trying to live?

Unfortunately, his lack of curiosity into the vampiric condition is somewhat tedious. Well, he is curious, but not as curious as I think most people would be under the same conditions, and his 'reveal' of the bacterial infection that explains both the psychological and physical aspects of the vampiric condition is sketchy science, and not all that amazing to boot. I recognize that the ideas where new for the time, but it has not aged very well- a danger perhaps for all oft-copied trailblazers.

I wanted to see more contemplation about the nature of replacing other species, the parallel between humans displacing previous species and the main character's current situation. Also, I wouldn't have minded more explanation/exploration of some of the more hard-to-explain aspects: how the world reacted to the plague and the government broke down and how the new society formed/was being run.

And I kinda thought it would be scarier. It was going for debauched at parts, but eh, too much navel-gazing. Maybe I'm desensitized to that sort of stuff. Or there wasn't levity to contrast the horror aspects, so they didn't end up feeling viscerally horrible at all. ( )

This is what the film should have been, without the overtones of God at the end, and a great grim ending instead. If only Hollywood hadn't seen fit to take a great story and add their own rubbish in (like they do with most conversions I suppose). As an example - the story with the dog is totally different here, as is the woman and child who find Neville.

If you were as disappointed by the ending of the film as I was, discovering this book after (as I did) makes for a delightful experience, but one where you wonder at whoever wrote the Hollywood script and butchered this great tale. ( )

Richard Matheson's I Am Legend is a short story about a man named Robert Neville, the last living human on the planet. To complicate things, due to a bacteria there are now vampires running amok who know where he lives. By day he hunts the vampires and kills them while they sleep, by night he inebriates himself and holes up in his house. He finds a dog, and another survivor, but both feed the fire of despair, loneliness and inebriation. And by day the legend grows.

Matheson weaves a compelling and frightening tale, and the emotions of Robert Neville are felt by the reader. The ending offers a wonderful twist, and the original story is far better than the recent Will Smith film of the same name. I Am Legend is such an influential story that it almost single-handedly invented the vampire/zombie apocalypse genre that is so prevalent in modern cinema.

This specific omnibus also features ten other short stories. A reader unfamiliar with Matheson may pass over them, or read them expecting very little compared to the titular story, but reading them will quickly change the readers mind. Several of the short stories are wonderfully frightening, and they all offer a horrific twist at the end. Highlights include Prey, Madhouse, and Person to Person, although each story is well written and highly entertaining. ( )

Robert Neville is the sole survivor of a plague that raised the dead and turned the living into vampire-like creatures who are sensitive to light and crave blood. Neville spends his days fortifying his house and gathering supplies, and his nights drinking himself stupid and listening to loud classical music to drown out the taunting voices of the vampires gathered outside. His other main activity is gathering wood and painstakingly whittling them down to stakes. He then goes to the surrounding houses and neighborhoods and systematically stabs vampires through their hearts during their daytime slumber.

Rousing himself from his drunken stupor, Neville decides to research the plague. He gathers lab equipment and biology books from abandoned libraries and discovers the germ that caused the plague, as well as how it spread so quickly. He encounters a woman during the day time, and after befriending her, discovers that she is a vampire. He soon learns that a group of infected humans have formulated a pill that suppresses their vampiric urges and allows them to remain in the sun for short periods of time. The infected humans eventually storm Neville's house, capturing him and locking him up for his crime of killing so many people.

"I Am Legend" is an exciting and enthralling read. Richard Matheson's prose is engaging and fluid. Most importantly, he creates an endearing protagonist in Robert Neville. His loneliness and depression at being the sole survivor of the human race is understandable. His self-mediation with alcohol makes him even more sympathetic. In the passages where he reaches dead ends in his research, his frustration is almost tangible. The reader rages with Neville and sulks with him, but also pities him for his self-rebuke when the answers don't come easily. Matheson's portrayal of Neville evokes a wide range of emotions with ease.

One of the most heartbreaking moments of the story is when Neville discovers a healthy dog. The cautious animal won't go near him, but Neville lures the dog by placing a bowl of food near his home, moving it closer each day. One day, the dog returns , obviously infected by the vampire germ. Neville desperately snatches the dog and brings the terrified animal inside, holding the animal in his first embrace of companionship in years. Without a cure, however, the dog dies and Neville is left bitter and alone again.

A new perspective to the world Neville lives in is revealed in the last quarter of the novel. Ruth, a woman Neville encounters during the daytime, appears to be the answer to Neville's loneliness, the companion he had been seeking since the beginning of the novel. Instead, Matheson delivers a crushing twist: Ruth is infected. At first it seems that she is doomed to die like the dog Neville had found earlier, but the twist goes even deeper in revealing her role as a spy for a group of infected humans. While Neville thought he was doing his duty as the last survivor in killing the infected, they had found a way to adapt to their condition and rebuild society around the new human condition.

This all leads to an excellent, if sad, conclusion to Neville's story. While he is being held in a jail cell before his execution, he looks out at the crowd that has gathered outside. When Neville shows himself at the window, the crowd cringes and cries in terror. He realizes that the countless infected bodies he staked has created a legend around himself as great as the one that grew about vampires.

Our sympathies originally lie with Neville because of his violent and difficult struggle against monsters trying to kill him. But in his hate and haste, he never checked to see if some humanity remained in those he murdered in their sleep. It is likely he killed many that had been using the pill to control their urges. In his zeal to kill monsters, Neville had become a monster himself. It's this reevaluation of Neville's action and the new reality of the world that makes the ending to this story so great. ( )

This book (which has been made into 3 movies) is short and brief. Unlike many modern novels, it doesn't spend too much time dwelling on the buildup of what happened or the past. We are immediately thrown into the current existence of Robert Neville, the last man on earth. In flashbacks we learn what has happened and feel for him when he has to bring his daughter to the body dump. We understand his reluctance to take his wife there too and can understand his rage at these creatures and what is happening.

What I really took away from this novel is that sense of utter aloneness and isolation Neville eventually feels. Maintaining your sanity in this type of situation much be almost impossible. His determination to save the dog and his desperation to capture the woman convey his abject solitude.

His efforts to understand and maybe even cure the virus are too little too late but do offer some revealing ideas about the nature of this disease and its history.

By the end of the book when we realize what has happened, it is sad and moving. No matter what he does now, Neville will always be alone and apart - a legend and a monster. The actions he was forced to take to survive have forever severed him from what is left of society. ( )

At first when I started listening (I have the audio version), I kept comparing it to the movie and thinking the movie was better. But as it went along my opinion totally changed. This was way better than the movie. No overdone messiah figure, no maudlin "a boy and his dog" with echoes of Old Yeller. Now that being said, there were parts I didn't like. The anger spells were just cheesy and poorly written IMHO. Also it is unbelievable that without any prior training and no one to assist him, this one guy came up with all this science. I don't buy it.

Now one reason why the book was better than the movie, is that the book actually makes sense out of the title which is the whole theme of the book. The movie absolutely didn't, and I left the movie wondering why the heck it was called that (call me sheltered but I didn't even know there was a book). It made no sense.

I don't even think the movie should have been called the same name--it radically departed from the story. Radically. It was at best derivative. Though the Fresh Prince's acting was, as usual, stellar.

One more reason not to like the movie. THEY SMASHED A GORGEOUS MAC PRO!! So while the protagonist was killing his dog, I was like, "Forget the dog, look what happened to the Mac!" ( )

A "classic" that just isn't that good. The movie was different, better. And I didn't like the movie either. ( )

Robert Neville is the last man on earth. But that does not mean that he is alone by any means – Neville is forced to bunker down in his house each night, to try and survive the onslaught of the dead who have since become vampires. “I Am Legend” charts the existence Robert Neville is forced to live – how he needs to build and maintain his shelter, his precarious hold on sanity, and his attempts to investigate what happened to the world in which he once lived.

Matheson manages to deal with all of the issues that have come to be expected of the “last man on earth” story – dealing with isolation, how people react without the guidance of society, how people manage to eke out an existence without a living, breathing society to provide for their needs. It’s all done quite well, enough time spent to make the ideas convincing, but not enough to bore those whom have read such things before.

One of the aspects of the novel that I greatly enjoyed about I Am Legend is how Richard Matheson manages to make vampires scientifically convincing. The various vampire mythologies, such as garlic, stakes, sunlight, pale skin, large fangs and so forth, are all explained in a scientific manner, is done convincingly, and this is done quite well. I would recommend this novel for that reason alone.

Another notable aspect of this novel is how “I am Legend” depicts a lone everyman alive in a world of undead creatures. It’s not really a story about one particular man (or woman, for that matter) trying to survive, it is actually the story of someone who survives such a catastrophe, who just happens to be a man named Robert Neville. He’s not special in any way whatsoever, doesn’t have particular qualifications or skills that could single him out anyone else, that are necessary for the story to progress. He’s not a scientist, combat veteran, a mechanic, or any other such role or position which would provide Neville with some aptitude that any other individual would not have. In fact, if such a situation were to occur, I would imagine many of my actions would be identical to those of Robert Neville, and that my struggles would well mirror his.

There are two minor points of criticism that I have with this novel. The first is that Neville’s reminiscences about his past life and family slow the pace of the book dramatically, and are not required to tell the story central to the novel. Although these flashbacks do expand upon Neville as a character, and help tell how the world fell, the main plot of the book does both of these things well enough already. The flashbacks make all of this blatantly obvious, are repetitive, and hence, unnecessary.

The other criticism that I have is of the character of Ruth, particularly Neville’s reaction to Ruth. She is a character that Neville meets, wandering around during the daytime, and whether Ruth is a vampire, or a human is something Neville is unsure of, but feels the need to investigate. I found Neville’s reaction to Ruth extremely implausible - a man who has believed himself to be the sole surviving human for years, who has had to fend off vampires each night, and kill them each day, should not trust Ruth as quickly as Neville did. While my critique of the flashbacks is more of a question of personal taste, the character of Ruth is a problem with the novel, and it is this that turns the book from a five-star novel into a four-and-a-half star novel.

I must recommend “I Am Legend”, whether you like horror, science fiction, or just reading in general. It’s an interesting idea for a story, and it is delivered quite well. Matheson’s attempts to scientifically rationalise vampires are quite convincing, and Neville, while starting as an individual without aptitudes or abilities, feels like a real character, with believeable mental and social problems, and his intellectual and mental progression is charted quite well. Highly recommended. ( )

This is an extremely compelling page-turner. It is not much like the movie at all, loosely related but an entirely different story. One of my favorite genres of books/movies/comics is the lone guy/small group against the incessant zombie/undead/infected hordes, and this one is a fantastic example of that style. ( )

This is an extremely compelling page-turner. It is not much like the movie at all, loosely related but an entirely different story. One of my favorite genres of books/movies/comics is the lone guy/small group against the incessant zombie/undead/infected hordes, and this one is a fantastic example of that style. ( )

If you're reading this after seeing the movie, you're going to be disappointed.

It's a great read otherwise. I got really into it. ( )

I loved this book. It had one of the best endings I've ever read. ( )

The title story is stellar, a page turner. The rest of the stories are an interesting mix, but somewhat hit or miss. ( )