Will contain spoilers!

Genre/s:

Horror, Sci-Fi

Themes:

Vampires, Loneliness, Death

Rating:

Description:

Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth… but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville’s blood.

By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn.

How long can one man survive like this?

My thoughts:

I Am Legend proves to be a more scientific take on vampirism, it does a great job of combining a post-apocalyptic sci-fi with the supernatural mythos of the vampire. It was a thought-provoking read that focuses a lot on loneliness and the mental health of a man in a terrible position without a single living soul to help him. It is interesting to see how someone can not only survive a situation like this but adapt and prepare. I did think this was a really clever book that was unique in how it portrayed vampires. Something to be aware of is that this book was published in the 50s so some of the language is outdated.

The story follows Robert Neville the last man left standing after a plague has swept the world turning everyone either into vampires or just dead. He has renovated his house, put in a generater, boarded up the windows, added in a workshop and a hothouse and stored up as much food as possible. I’m quite surprised that he can still have electric and running water when no one is left to work. The vampires gather outside his house at nighttime, calling to him and trying to get him to come out. One of these vampires was a close friend of his when he was alive. He spends his nights listening to records and drinking a lot, it’s clear he is abusing alcohol to forget about what has happened. It seems like these vampires have no problem with attacking each other if there are no humans around. Quite often in the mornings Robert finds dead vampires outside, he takes them to be burnt so they can’t come back.

During the days, Robert seems to spend his time hunting for vampires whilst they are in a coma like state and killing them. It is curious that these vampires seem to have an aversion to garlic, flinch from crosses and die from being staked. Robert finds this interesting as they seem so much like the supernatural myths from Dracula rather than from a virus. I did like that we get some flashbacks to the early days of this plague. Robert’s wife got sick quite early on but they had no clue where the illness came from but he does make a mention of dust storms occuring and getting through the cracks of the house. Most of the time he is just spending his time surviving and fixing things that break.

Robert does decide to look more into the cause of the virus and maybe finding a cure of some sort. His first port of call is the library to find some books, he decides to learn more about blood as it seems this is important for them. He also starts experimenting to see if he needs to stab them in a certain place with the stake and also tries to figure out what in garlic repulses them. He tries to extract what he thinks it is but when he injects them with it, nothing happens.

Just after he starts to work on figuring the whole thing out he comes across a dog in the streets during the day. We find out animals can be infected as well but this one is out during the day so it seems he has finally found a living creature that is like him. He is very excited to discover this but ends up scaring the dog away. Robert leaves food out for the dog and finds it gone later on. Over the next weeks he builds up trust with the dog and speaks to it all the time until finally it lets Robert touch it. Not long after he gains the dogs trust does it stop appearing, when it next turns up the dog is infected. A week later the dog is dead and Robert is alone once again.

He does figure out quite a bit about the virus but it seems only the deadly exposure to sunlight seems to be based on the science. The other things make no sense logically which annoys Robert to no end. He also comes to the conclusion that when the virus isn’t getting what it needs to survive they go into that coma like sleep that happens during the day but also the virus gives out spores. Robert thinks this is how it spread rather than only being passed on through contact, it seems likely that the dust storms might have helped with spreading the virus.

One day when Robert is out and about he sees a sight he never thought he would again; a woman wandering around. He has to remind himself that it is daytime and she is outside and not dying, it seems likely she is a real alive person. Of course having no interaction with a person in a few years he handles the situation very poorly. It is quite clear she is scared of him and what he might do to her so she runs away from him. He chases her down and basically drags her back to his house. He views it as him helping her and he has no intentions of hurting her, he really just wants the company.

At first she doesn’t want to speak to him but eventually she relaxes and they end up talking. Robert has still not decided whether she is a vampire or not so asked for her blood so he can test it. He promises that if she is infected that he will try to find a cure but so far hes not made any progress to figure this out. She says he can but in the morning, she wants to know what he has figured out about the virus thus far. Robert tells her everything he knows and also about the experiments he has performed. Its clear to her that he no longer thinks of the vampires as anywhere close to human and so doesn’t feel bad for killing them. This is the first time he has seen a different viewpoint, she thinks there is a difference between the live ones and the ones that are dead and only being kept alive by the virus. Robert has seen it as his mission to kill as many as he could but maybe he was wrong.

In the morning when testing her blood Robert finds that she is infected and was spying for the vampires. She warns him that they will likely try to kill him after they deal with the dead vampires as he is the odd one out now. But this woman does not think he deserves that and he is a good man. We do find out that the vampires worked and came up with their own sort of cure a pill that gives them the same affect as blood and allows them to go out in the day. It also turns out that Robert killed this womans husband which is why she agreed to spy on him.

Eventually Robert sees the living vampires going around and killing the dead vampires in a violent way, he is disgusted that they seem to be enjoying it. Eventually they do come for him but don’t kill him right away. The woman he met is actually one of the ones in charge of this new society. The worst of it is he discovers that the vampires are actually scared of him and he wasn’t exactly killing without any enjoyment. It is really interesting to see a different perspective at the end, it really changes how Robert views himself. Maybe he isn’t really the hero of this story after all. Knowing he can’t have a place in this new society Robert kills himself and allows himself to be a legend to these vampires. We did discover that Robert thinks he is immune to the disease due to being bitten by a vampire bat during a war that was infected so his body learned to fight it off.

I really enjoyed this unique take on vampires and how it ended up being more sci-fi with Robert actually trying to discover what was causing it and spreading the disease. Robert wasn’t really a likeable character but he was in a very difficult situation. I did like that this story explored the themes of loneliness and how his mental health was affected by everything that happened. Its clear he has had no chance to properly grieve his wife and daughter before the whole world went to shit. Its no surprise he drinks to numb the pain and gets angry when things don’t go to plan. I do like that he is not really a hero and doesn’t actually end up figuring it all out. I enjoyed the twist that the vampires weren’t actually these brain-dead monsters but smart enough to figure things out for themselves. I also really enjoyed the writing style and managed to binge this book in a day, it was gripping and really intelligently written. The actions scenes were also exciting and well written, the pacing was really good throughout. The ending took me by surprise but I really loved how it all played out. This was a short book but one I am sure to remember for a long time.

I made the mistake of watching the Will Smith movie shortly after finishing the book and being severely disappointed. It wasn’t exactly bad for a horror movie, but it tried a bit too hard to be essentially a generic zombie movie. I didn’t like that it took all the intelligent bits out of the book and made the main character into a hero. I would say I did prefer that the dog was with him from the very start, this did make us feel more. I disliked that the vampires were made into these mindless creatures that couldn’t even talk and just screamed. The alternate ending was a bit better, but this would only make sense to those who read the book first.