I Am Legend
by Richard Matheson
read: 2011
Guardian 1000 Novels
Happy Halloween! I've spent a good portion of this month catching up the AMC series The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead, like virtually everything in the zombie survival genre, owes a debt to I Am Legend, Richard Matheson's 1954 story of Richard Neville, the last man on earth after some strange disease turns the rest of the world's population into vampires. Neville walks around by day, gathering supplies and killing vampires, and holes up in his house by night, hoping his preparations make him safe from the undead horde. If that sounds like the plot of a George Romero movie, that's no surprise; according to Romero, I Am Legend helped inspire Night of the Living Dead. That said, I Am Legend is not a great book. It's not a bad read, but Neville isn't a compelling character, and of course we spend a lot of time with him since there's no one else. I'm not going to recommend it, but if you want to see where the zombie apocalypse craze started, go ahead and read I Am Legend.
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