Robert Neville is alone. Each day he leaves his small home and scours the lonely town stores that surround him, looking for food and supplies. Each day is the same as the last and time has begun to blur together. How long has it been since it all started? Are there any others like him? Neville has a lot of questions, but he doesn’t have a lot of time, the sun is beginning to set and that means they will be coming out to feed soon. As night falls and the undead begin to wake from their slumber, one thing is for sure, Robert Neville will not get a good night’s sleep.

Written by Richard Matheson, I Am Legend is a horror lovers delight. A story of isolation and determination, the reader is taken into the day to day life of Robert Neville, a man who may well be the last human on earth, as outside of his doors lurk hordes of vampires who wait until the sun goes down to search the streets for prey.

I enjoyed this story quite a lot, it’s dark and brooding and can easily be read in one to two settings if you get caught up in it’s pages, but I don’t think it is the masterpiece a lot of folks claim it to be.

The story follows the fallout of a biological war, in the early seventies, I believe, and by the time the war is over whatever was released by the warring factions seems to turn millions of people into quasi-vampire beings. By the late seventies, in which most of the story takes place, the vampiric beings have taken over the surface world and the few humans that remain alive, must now find ways to forage for their survival. Neville has accomplished this by securing his house to the nines and going out only during the day. At night, however, he gets drunk and whines a lot.

Neville is what annoyed me most about this book, I never really found myself able to care for the character that much, I just was never able to bond with him. It almost happened when he found the stray dog, but by the middle of the book, I was hoping he would just die of cirrhosis and be done with it. Seriously, all he does is get drunk and pass out every damn night, kind of like Paynecraft did in his college years.

Also the character is made out to be a man’s kind of man in the beginning, kind of like a construction worker or something, but one trip to the public library and BOOM SHANKA now he is a master chemist, I just never bought in to this side of the character in any way whatsoever.

Anyway as the story goes on we learn of Neville’s past and some of his hunting missions that he has been on and that have been pissing off the local blood sucking neighbors quite a bit, which leads to the grand showdown in the end, but not in a way you would expect.

I Am Legend is an entertaining story and a good premise, but some of the hoopla in the story’s pages just seem kind of to rewrite itself as it goes along, but hey, that may just be me.

I Am Legend has been greenlit for a new movie so if you want to take a few minutes and read the original then do so, or you could watch either The Omega Man or The Last Man on Earth, both of which have been based on this book.

6 of 10