Vampires were trendy in 2012. The fifth Twilight film was racking up more than $800 million in box office receipts. And bloodsucker brand extensions were coming out thick and fast. (My award for the most implausible film of the year goes to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter .) Meanwhile, HBO was serving up anemic episodes of True Blood , and new vampire books were flooding an already saturated market, with new volumes coming out in the Bloodlines series by Richelle Mead, The Hollows series by Kim Harrison, the Chicagoland Vampires series by Chloe Neill, and many other genre brands with high red blood cell count. The "vampire teen romance" section at Barnes & Noble—which didn't even exist a few years before—was now a favorite meeting place for the high school 'in' crowd.
The Horror Writers Association needed to jump on this bandwagon, and decided to to give a special award for the "Vampire Novel of the Century." Ah, but they bypassed all these new upstarts, and other estimable candidates, in order to honor a pulp fiction book that was almost sixty years old: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954).
They made the right choice. After Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Matheson's work has been the most admired, and influential, work in the category. Stephen King, the bestselling horror writer of all time, has cited Matheson in general, and I Am Legend in particular, as a source of inspiration. In King's word, Matheson was "the author who influenced me the most as a writer." Horror author Ramsey Campbell has noted that this single book was able to "revolutionize vampirism." Even Anne Rice, who had hoped to win the 'best of century' honor for her classic Interview with the Vampire , admitted that it was hard to complain about losing to an author "whose stories were inspiring me when I was still a kid writing everything with a ballpoint pen in a school notebook."
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Others have seen I Am Legend as much more than genre thriller. Some critics have praised Matheson for translating Cold War anxieties into the context of horror fiction, or for making a thinly-veiled plea for racial tolerance (the novel takes place in South Central LA, on the same streets I frequented in my youth). Matheson’s book has also been praised as a classic existential account of loneliness, in the mold of Robinson Crusoe , and as anticipating the AIDS epidemic that would arise a generation after the novel’s publication.
In fact, academics have now embrace d I Am Legend as talisman of a host of trendy theories and ideologies. The 2014 publication of Reading Richard Matheson: A Critical Survey , edited by Cheyenne Matthews and Janet Haedicke , heralded the start of this new phase in the life of th e vampire book that just won't stay dead. H ere you will find a Foucaultian reading of Matheson's novel, and a post-colonial interpretation, along with other ways of turning this sixty-year-old novel into something suitable for new millennium scholars. And though the academic jargon is sometimes disconcerting ( While the anomalous multitude germinates potentialities, the novel shows that vampirism biopolitics absorbs difference... ), I have to admit that some of these new perspectives add to the resonance of the book. There is, in the final analysis, more than a small degree of overlap between the respective themes of Madness and Civilization , Discipline and Punish and I Am Legend . True, not everyone has celebrated this book, and criticisms were often pointed back in the early days afters its initial publication . The frequently snarky Damon Knight claimed that "the plot limps" and that all of Matheson's good ideas are discarded almost as soon as they appear. At the time of its first release, a reviewer in Galaxy reproached the author for his novel's slow pace. But the complaint about Matheson's book that struck me as most credible came from an online reviewer who grumbled: “I had a nightmare about this book last night. Not fun.”
Matheson himself had a simple explanation for the book’s origins. After seeing the movie Dracula at age sixteen, he decided that if one vampire was scary, even more terrifying might be an entire world filled with vampires. As to other theories of the book’s hidden meaning, he responds: "I don't think the book means anything more than it is: the story of a man trying to survive in a world of vampires."
Matheson breaks many of the most basic rules of horror fiction in this work. Although this novel initiated the craze for stories about a zombie apocalypse —a plot that is more popular nowadays than ever before—he actually opens the book after the decimation of the population. The zombie wars are finished, and the human race has dwindled down to a sole individual, our hero Robert Neville.
Much of the book focuses on his day-to-day activities as a lonely survivor. He plants garlic, and hangs garlands of it around his house. He boards up windows and takes other steps to keep his home protected. During the day, he hunts for sleeping vampires and hammers stakes through their hearts. And occasionally he remembers the past, events he would prefer to forget.
Matheson deals with all these issues with a surprisingly light touch, focusing on details that rarely come to the forefront of horror stories. The longest chapter in I Am Legend deals with Neville's attempt to befriend a stray dog, the only familiar creature he has encountered in the three years since society collapsed. Few genre writers would know what to do with a sub-plot of this sort, but Matheson not only makes it emotionally riveting, but even finds a way conclude the chapter with perhaps the most chilling moments in the novel.
Matheson also finds time to insert two romance angles into his book, and not with the kind of awkward grafting we usually find in genre stories. Both love interests are integrated into the larger plot, and amplify the horror of proceedings. The moment when his first wife, who died in the vampire epidemic, returns to her grieving husband, is one of the most memorable passages in the novel. But here again, Matheson refuses to handle this encounter in the expected manner, instead deftly presenting this story in bits and pieces over the course of the book, some aspects described in flashback, others in dialogue or interior monologue.
There is nothing flashy in this novel. Or in Matheson’s other books. Matheson is a storyteller, not a prose stylist. He works with great economy, and (as Damon Knight noted) often moves from scene to scene with insistent forward motion. But he also knows when to linger—and almost always because he sense an opportunity to amplify the emotional charge of his tale. We see that here in the subplot about the dog, or the carefully constructed adversarial relationship between Neville and Ben Cortman, his former neighbor who is now the most deadly of the marauding vampires.
The book has filmed on several occasions, but never with much fidelity to Matheson’s original vision. "I don't know why Hollywood keeps coming back to the book just to not do it the way I wrote it," he told an interviewer. "The book should have been filmed as is at the time it came out. It's too late now." In fact, Matheson wrote a script for Hammer Films back in the 1950s—and at one point director Fritz Lang was on board to direct it. But the studio ditched the project because they anticipated problems with censors.
I believe this is Matheson’s best work, and deserves a film rendition that returns to his original vision. But the author himself had a different view. "They should just stop trying," he said, when asked about another movie version of I Am Legend . "To me, vampires are totally passé anyway. They are disgusting creatures who smell bad and are revolting in every way. Turning female vampires into sexy creatures is absurd."
And, true, if you are seeking sexy vampires, you can skip Richard Matheson's book. Or his other works, for that matter. But even his vampires have redeeming qualities. Perhaps the most surprising twist, in book filled with them, comes at the conclusion of I Am Legend , when our hero realizes how much he has in common with the evil creatures of the night he has been battling since page one.
But don’t expect a novel of sort to end with a happy love fest or truce between the undead and the living. That’s not Richard Matheson’s style. Instead you will learn exactly what it takes to become a legend. And why that’s a fate—the example of Mr. Matheson himself notwithstanding—you should try to avoid at all costs.
Yet the future of this book may have less to do with happy endings, and more with the various ways the text can be applied to theories of narrative and cultural hegemonies. I Am Legend may have spent its first half-century as the great vampire novel, but in its new life it has turned into a classic text of outsiders and victims, countercultures and marginalized communities. I'm not sure that Richard Matheson would approve, but he didn't much care for the movie versions and other 'straight' ways of interpreting his horror story. For better or worse, he may have created a legend much different from the one he anticipated.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His most recent book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , is published by Oxford University Press.
A fter 4 film adaptations and two generations of readers, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend enters a new life as a talisman for academics
Here you will find a Foucaultian reading of Matheson's novel, and a post-colonial interpretation, along with other ways of turning this 6 0 -year - old novel into something suitable for new millennium scholars...