I am legend

Robert Neville is, as far as he knows, the last man on Earth. A plague has turned everyone else--including his wife and infant daughter--into vampires or vampire food, but Neville for some reason finds himself immune. In the aftermath, he has converted a house into a bunker and lives a monotonous, lonely existence; at night his home is besieged by mindless monsters, and his days are filled with hunting, scavenging, and repairing the nightly damage to his fortress.

I Am Legend seems to be mostly concerned with the human response to isolation, and I found Matheson's take to be a little disturbing. Neville is understandably dealing with crushing grief, fear, and loneliness, but his response to the female vampires was...excessively rapey. It was off-putting and hard to relate to; this might say something about the time in which the author lived (IAL was published almost sixty years ago), or maybe Matheson just has issues, I don't know. Anyway, Neville eventually finds a measure of peace in the search for knowledge, teaching himself science in an attempt to understand the how and why of his world's transformation.


SPOILER ALERT

The story ends abruptly: Neville is discovered and killed by a community of "civilized" vampires, who fear him and his hunting skills. It felt to me like a missed opportunity to explore xenophobia and the human instinct to destroy rather than communicate.

This book is a great and well written novel that takes place in a post apocolyptic future. For anyone who has watched the movie you can forget thinking they're at all similar. The book is far better than the movie and has a great twist ending.

After seeing and enjoying the movie "I am Legend" starring Will Smith, I decided I had to read the book. The only thing I had heard about the book was that the movie was very different from the book. The book was enjoyable, and, like I had heard, very different from the movie. I just wish there was more to it. More details, more adventures, more of everything. Then I realized this was a short novel. I am not going to discuss the differences here because it will ruin parts of the book. One of the main differences that won't ruin anything is the occupation of Robert Neville. Because he is a scientist in the movie and and not in the book the way he goes about doing things is different. I feel like this had an affect on the way he dealt with things and discovered things. There were elements of both the book and the movie that I liked but I liked the story of the movie better in the end. This could be because I am from a different generation and could relate to the movie Robert Neville better than the book Robert Neville, or maybe just because I saw the movie so many times before I read the book. Either way, the book was good and worth reading to compare the two and see where it started!

I have not yet seen "The Last Man On Earth" or "The Omega Man", two other film adaptations of Richard Matheson's book.