Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend — Who Gets to Call Themselves Normal?

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, first published in 1954, is one of the enduring works of modern horror. A man alone in a city is enough to set it in motion.

The book stayed with later writers as well as readers. Stephen King has cited Matheson as a major influence and named I Am Legend among the books that inspired him.

A Novel Filmmakers Kept Returning To

The premise has gone to the screen several times. The 2007 Will Smith film reached the broadest contemporary audience, though it was preceded by two adaptations with very different approaches.

Smith’s film takes the last-survivor premise and makes a story of its own from it. Much of what happens on screen follows a different course from the novel.

The films associated with the book include:

1. The Last Man on Earth (1964)
2. The Omega Man (1971)
3. I Am Legend (2007)
4. I Am Omega (2007, unofficial)

In each case, I missed some of the novel’s mixture of dread, frustration and loneliness.

Where the Book and the Will Smith Film Part Company

Smith makes the loneliness of a man left behind intelligible. There are scenes in which a city full of traces of other people does more than an empty landscape could.

The adaptation still follows a different plot. Knowing the movie leaves much of the book ahead of you.

Matheson’s creatures are vampires. Much of the story concerns the emotional work of remaining alone, while the film puts more weight on Neville’s struggle to find a way forward for humanity.

The book’s Neville starts out as an ordinary man who has to learn what he can. The film makes him a scientist with expertise that matters to the plot.

The Novel’s Robert Neville

A pandemic has transformed the people around Neville into vampires. The ruins of ordinary life remain, and he has to go on living among them.

Robert Neville appears to be the last uninfected man.

In daylight he looks for sleeping vampires and kills them. At night he goes home and shuts himself in. It is a routine that makes the loneliness harder to escape with each repetition.

The Voices outside the House

Matheson makes loneliness physical. Among the vampires trying to draw Neville outside are women who taunt him sexually. Their presence presses on the part of him that still wants human company.

The story turns when it becomes clear that some of the infected can think and organise. The figure Neville thought of as a mindless enemy proves inadequate.

From the point of view of people building another society, the man who hunts them is himself a source of terror.

Who Defines Normal?

The change of perspective leaves Neville facing a question about what separates the normal from the abnormal.

• “Normalcy was a majority concept,” Neville realises.

If the people Neville calls vampires now make up the society, they get to give words such as normal and monstrous their everyday meaning. That is where the title begins to turn.

The Two Sides of a Legend

A legend can be a figure whose deeds survive in the telling. It can also be a figure people speak of because it belongs to a world they no longer encounter.

As the last survivor of his kind, Neville becomes a story told by the people who will live after him. The title is his realisation of how they will remember him.

A Short Book That Leaves a Long Shadow 

I Am Legend is short and written in direct prose. There is little distance between the reader and Neville’s routine.

Stephen King has named it as an inspiration. Its scale makes it easy to see how one writer’s plain telling can give another writer room to imagine something of their own.

King also valued concision in On Writing. Matheson gets a great deal out of a narrow setting and a limited cast.

The book leaves questions behind even after it gives you a conclusion. That may be one reason filmmakers keep returning to a story that remains itself on the page.

Book Information

I Am Legend

Author

Richard Matheson

First published

1954

ISBN13

9780765357151

View the book on YES24

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