I Am Legend (novel) | Description & Facts

I Am Legend, science-fiction novel written by American author Richard Matheson, published in 1954.

In a suburb of Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Robert Neville is perhaps the last human alive. Everyone else on the planet has been turned into a vampire. During the day, when the creatures are comatose, he seeks them out and kills them with a wooden stake, fixes the defences on his house, strings up the garlic again, and clears dead vampires off the lawn.

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At night, he barricades himself indoors and drinks himself into a stupor while the vampires taunt him and try to break in. But these are not mythological vampires such as Dracula; they include his neighbours and other people he knew. By conducting a variety of experiments, Neville learns that the condition has been caused by a bacterium to which he alone is immune. Further experiments explain all the “facts” about vampires involving fear of light and garlic, invisibility in mirrors, need for fresh blood, immunity to bullets, susceptibility to wooden stakes, and aversion to religious symbols. The true horror of the story does not lie in the fights with the vampires, but in what the life Neville is forced to lead does to him. He is totally alone, forced to barbaric slaughter on a daily basis just to survive, hanging on to a life that he does not really want to live any more.

Matheson’s calm writing style does nothing to lessen the chill or the impact of Neville’s pain as he describes the death of his wife and daughter. As Neville loses his grip on sanity and comes close to giving up, the reader comes to understand what one man can endure if he has to and what happens when he goes too far. The final twist in the tale brings about the realization that Neville, the last human, is now the monster of legend.

Matheson’s novel has been adapted for the screen several times, including a 2007 version starring Will Smith as Neville.