I Am Legend

Reading the introduction, I wondered what a book about vampires has to do with science fiction. It turned out that it has, something – I Am Legend is an interesting mix of horror and science fiction.

This was a refreshingly short book that was alright as a whole, although the introduction created way too high expectations for the ending.

The first action scene was actually very exciting. However, the best parts of the book were Robert's inner struggles with loneliness and his battle against going insane. And goddammit, the thing with the dog. It was pretty bad. :C

This tedious seemingly unedited novel is the source of a few movies and is considered by many to be the father of all subsequent zombie stories, and so, some kind of masterwork. I don't usually finish books that I think I don't like, so I don't have many (any?) one-star reviews, but after stopping when the author gave an absurd definition of bacteriophage (even for the mid-50s), I picked it up again and finished it. It's short and might be thought exciting.
I was especially fascinated by the number of times that the protagonist became enraged and spilled liquor on himself or his furniture, the number of times things happened "convulsively" (the Kindle search shows 10 hits), the description of microscope magnification in fractions of an inch, the unbelievable premise of the ending, and the extraordinarily prolonged and uninteresting account of the dog.

I read this for class and my expectations were WAY exceeded. The brilliance of this book makes that movie with Will Smith seem horribly butchered. It doesn't really have anything to do with the book anymore.

In the book, Robert Neville tries to come to terms with his fate as the last man on earth which makes the book quite philosophical. But there are also some fun occurrences of intertextuality, for example when he rants about Bram Stoker's Dracula. Unlike in a lot of vampire stories, Neville even tries to explain the existence of vampires by scientific means, by reading up on microbiology and experimenting on vampires during the day.

It's a very compelling read, one of the few books I've read within such a short period of time. It's a very impressive book for its time (1954).

Although I felt it reads like a debut novel - in that there are a few places of information dumps ('tell' rather than 'show') to move the plot along - this is an excellent book. It's nothing like the films that have been based on it, though the films clearly extract key points from the novel.

The edition I read had a review blurb by Dean Koontz on the back, saying that it's "the best vampire novel since Dracula." I agree.