This month features: I am Legend, Richard Matheson, Gollancz, 1857988094, £6.99 |
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It is past midnight. The house is empty. You are completely alone. Your wife and daughter and everyone you ever knew or heard of are all dead, or undead. The vampires are outside your house, and they’re trying to get in. You protect the house in any way you can. With garlic. With mirrors. With crucifixes. The vampires throw rocks against the boarded up windows. They’re trying to get you outside. Into the night. They call you by name. ‘Come out, Robert Neville.’ You are tortured by sexual frustration. The female vampires tempt you by displaying themselves, touching themselves. You resist, just. You get drunk, turn the music up. You try to sleep. And when daylight comes, they are gone. And once more you are free – free to repair your defences, get in more supplies, visit your wife’s tomb and – in between – to stick stakes in as many of the bloodsucking bastards as you can find, a-sleeping in the shade.
‘He felt the cold, powerful hands clamp on his throat and smelled the fetid breath clouding over his face. The two of them went reeling back towards the sidewalk and the white-fanged mouth went darting down at Robert Neville’s throat.’
That’s the stuff! That’s the kind of thing we’re after!
‘He jerked open the door and shot the first one in the face. The man went spinnning back off the porch and two women came at him in muddy, torn dresses, their white arms spread to enfold him. He watched their bodies jerk as the bullets struck them, then he shoved them both aside and began firing his guns into their midst, a wild yell ripping back his bloodless lips.’
Published in 1954, I am Legend takes place in a post-nuclear world. (Los Angeles. 1976.) About halfway through, Robert Neville remembers a conversation with his wife. They were discussing the reason for the pandemic that was affecting her, as well as millions of others:
‘“The bombings?” she said.
‘“Maybe,” he said.
‘“Well, they’re causing the dust storms. They’re probably causing a lot of things.”
‘She sighed wearily and shook her head.
‘“And they say we won the war,” she said.
‘“Nobody won it.”’
George Orwell’s original title for 1984 was The Last Man in Europe. Richard Matheson could just as well have called his novel The Last Man in America. And, like many of the books I’ve written about as cult, it owes a debt to Daniel Defoe:
‘All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.’
(That Santa Claus sentence is so Stephen King it’s unbelieveable. The King of Horror has paid his homage to I am Legend, as have most of the Princes and Princesses. King says Matheson is ‘the author who influenced me most’.)
Isolated, fighting madness, liquor, exhaustion, and sexual rage, Richard Neville (whose name contains hard evil) fights back with rationalistic science. What is the cause of vampirism? Why are vampires afraid of crosses? Why do they avoid the daylight? What chemical element of garlic repulses them?
This is the only way. As the narrator says, ‘In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.’
Without wishing to give too much away, Neville finds his answers – whatever good they do him.
Very little of I am Legend has dated in any way. Once, the hero smokes a pipe, and a contemporary author would probably have mentioned genes, chromosomes and biochemical multinational corporations, but the novel retains a powerful, pulpy drive towards its legendary conclusion.
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Author interviews
