Vampire Classic, rightly so...
 Jul 18th, 2000
Advantages:
Classic vampire fiction, that opened our perspective to creatures outside Victorian melodrama .
Disadvantages:
There are none . If you read horror, read this .
Recommendable:
Yes
Detailed rating:
Would you read it again?
Story
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How does it compare to other works by the same author?
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  RichardW
About me:
Well, I'm a recently married horror writer, so my mood swings between the macabre and the blissful a...
Member since:11.07.2000
Reviews:92
Members who trust:69
Review rated by 9 Ciao members on average: very helpful 
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Read Comment
Needless to say, 'I Am Legend' is a classic of the horror genre. It's somewhat odd then that my copy of it comes from the Millennium 'SF Masterworks' series, recently released in the UK. I shan't complain too harshly, however. It's too pleasing to see it in bookshops again. Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth. Worse than this, every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire, and each would like a sample of the last human blood on the planet. By night, he barricades himself into his home, modified now as a fortress. By day, he takes his turn as the hunter, finding the hiding places of the undead and putting an end to them.
The cycle of hunter and victim is key to the novel's success - inevitably, Neville must somehow slip up or fail. Much of the tension from this terse epic comes from this inevitability. We watch his every move, wondering as we go whether we have seen him do something wrong, whether the next page is going to give us the consequences of some tiny mistake he has made. Some of the novel's finest, most thrilling action sequences come from this point of tension. After all, how long can one man survive in such circumstances? Neville is well drawn in his aching loneliness, and his grief is a palpable, affecting force throughout 'I Am Legend'. Having lost everything, he spends much of his time wondering why he is even considering the continuation of his existence, why it would not be better to just cease and die. Philosophically, the novel raises many interesting points about the nature of survival instinct.
Further along that topic, the novel shifts fascinatingly in tone about halfway through, when it becomes clearer that, to the vampires, it is Neville who is the monster, striking at them during the daylight hours, a legend to scare their young with… The novel is an exercise in bare bones writing; spare, lean and to the point. It rewrote the vampire landscape, opening up possibilities beyond the caped melodrama offered by Stoker. A novel that you must read, basically.
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14.06.2001 09:25
I'd forgotten about this book, must dig my copy out again, you've reminded me why I loved it - thanks!
18.12.2000 17:02
So if they're vampires what do they eat?? Do they breed?? I'll give this a go, sounds good.