Alex Cabe reviewed I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
Groundbreaking, but later authors would do more with it.
3 stars
This was primarily interesting to me because it showed me the early versions of tropes that have become familiar in the sci-fi and horror genres. It doesn't achieve greatness but sets the framework for later works by other authors that do.
It's kind of difficult to judge a book like this because things that were novel or big reveals have since become familiar tropes. The central concept of I Am Legend is rock solid, but it sometimes drags or goes on tangents, even with the short length, and I never found the scientific explanations either easy to follow or convincing.
Witch War was my favorite of the short stories, and I'd love to see someone adapt it or expand it into a larger book. From Shadowed Places had obviously outdated and questionable racial elements.
A lot of these felt like spec scripts for The Twilight Zone, so I wasn't surprised …
This was primarily interesting to me because it showed me the early versions of tropes that have become familiar in the sci-fi and horror genres. It doesn't achieve greatness but sets the framework for later works by other authors that do.
It's kind of difficult to judge a book like this because things that were novel or big reveals have since become familiar tropes. The central concept of I Am Legend is rock solid, but it sometimes drags or goes on tangents, even with the short length, and I never found the scientific explanations either easy to follow or convincing.
Witch War was my favorite of the short stories, and I'd love to see someone adapt it or expand it into a larger book. From Shadowed Places had obviously outdated and questionable racial elements.
A lot of these felt like spec scripts for The Twilight Zone, so I wasn't surprised to find out after reading the the author wrote a lot of Twilight Zone episodes.
The audiobook narrators tried a little to hard to do funny voices, and neither was any good at women's voices.
