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Tarfumes.com - I Am Legend
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Tor Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780765318749
ISBN: 0765318741
Label: Tor Books
Manufacturer: Tor Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2007-10-30
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: 2007-10-30
Studio: Tor Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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Robert Neville may well be the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone.
An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy him. By day, he is a hunter, stalking the infected monstrosities through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn.... Richard Matheson’s classic novel has now been transformed by Warner Bros. into a major motion picture starring Academy Award nominee Will Smith. Directed by Francis Lawrence (“Constantine”), the film opens nationwide in December 2007.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Where Have You Gone, Charleton Heston?
Comment: It's beyond me to understand how horror fans can go on and on about their favorite horror books as if they were written by Pynchon or Nabokov. The bottomline about "I Am Legend" is simple: it's about loneliness and loss in a post-apocalypse world overrun by vampires. If that doesn't cause you to dissolve with laughter, then "I Am Legend" might be for you. It's well-written, holds the reader's interest, and has been the basis for three movies. It will appeal to most teenage boys (or to grown up men who remember how the world feels to teenage boys). However, it doesn't deserve five stars because it doesn't have enough cool details about the end of humanity.
I didn't see "The Omega Man" when it came out in the early 1970s. However, one of the kids at my junior high school got to see it and described every detail of the story to me. I was captivated. Now I'm almost 50. Now Charleton Heston is dead. I am legend.
Customer Rating:
Summary: ... worth it.
Comment: I read the book because I saw the movie (as surely many others did). I have to say that I actually liked the movie more, but they are so different that it's hardly worth comparing them.
The whole story is about what it would be like to be, basically, the last man alive. Although the conclusions it reaches are not entirely happy, the ending left me with a lot to think about in a way that the movie did not. It felt like it was political in some sense, but I'm not sure exactly what to think of it.
Although the story is older (1950s? I think '54...) it is written in a very modern style -- and it's horror that's neither gothic nor "splatter." I'd recommend it if only because it's not what you're expecting, and it does not end how you expect it to end.
The best thing about this book, however, is that it is followed by a collection of short stories... actually, about half of the book is short stories. Some of the stories were better than the novel, in my opinion, although not all.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book and literature
Comment: It is perhaps the greatest novel written on human loneliness. It far surpasses Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe in that regard. Its insights into what it is to be human go far beyond genre, and is all the more surprising because, having read his short stories- which range from competent but simplistic, to having classic Twilight Zone twists (he was a major contributor to the original tv series) there is nothing within those short stories that suggests the supreme majesty of the existential masterpiece I Am Legend was aborning.
Not only is it more than a horror or sci fi tale, it is more than just a post-apocalyptic work as well. It is (written in 1953, and published in 1954) a far more subtle allegory on the McCarthyism of the day, as well the rigid conformity of the 1950s leading to the cultural sterilization and death of the masses. Compared to such filmic fare from that decade, as On The Beach- or its written source, or even The World, The Flesh, The Devil, it stands even higher because criticism from either side of the spectrum, politically- the idle and gullible Left and the vicious and pandering Right- was generally heavy-handed and obvious. Even when compared to later works, some with direct debts, like George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead, or those intriguing alternative visions to the end of the world- Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe Of Heaven (another great apocalyptic novel) or the 1985 New Zealand film The Quiet Earth, I Am Legend stands alone with its relentless focus on the self, and the relation to things exterior.
It deconstructs the vampire myth with modern methods, attempting to explain many of its legendary aspects with science- such as why non-Christian vampires would fear the cross- they don't, why a stake kills a vampire but not a bullet- a stake allows corrupting air into the bodily glue of a vampire (although the silver bullet myth is untouched), why vampires can metamorphose into bats or wolves- they can't, why some vampires turn to dust at death- their already long-dead bodies instantly decompose while living vampires' bodies don't, why mirrors repel them- psychological traumas, and a number of others....a mark of any enduring work of art is its continued, and renewable, relevance through time. A half a century on Neville himself emerges as another sort of figure of the Right- not as the Van Helsing-like McCarthy, but the solipsistic, indolent corporate fat cats and paranoid, self-pitying Goddists of the Bush era. Like the modern Right believes itself to be, he is besieged in a redoubt, fending off the mindless drones of blood and hedonism (the harlot vampires `posing like lewd puppets in the night'), even as he is anachronized. He joys in small victories. He loses himself in an idealized past, fortifies himself with the remnants of a lost glory (Classical music), lashes out at his enemies with no regard to differences, and that some of them are far more like him than he admits, and loses himself in fantasies of violence and sex, not unlike the Timothy McVeigh crowd.
Many questions remain at tale's end: Why did the New Breed have to wait so long to come and get Neville? Was Neville really the last man on earth, or just in LA, or his part of LA? Why were the dead and living vampires so dumb- even Neville queries why they didn't simply set his house on fire?
We'll never know, and why should we? Have we been enlightened, entertained? Yes. That's all that a work of art need do. Too many modern writers go overboard with masturbatory detail, thinking that good writing consists of the curlicues of minutia, squared! The idea being that detailed boredom is better than plain old boredom. My wife has complained of passages in the novel Cold Mountain where the author, Charles Frazier, spends pages describing the details of Civil War weaponry, yet his characters are utter stereotypes. He doesn't get it. Matheson did in I Am Legend. There are gaps in the science of I Am Legend- they were apparent in 1954, and some of the science is even more manifestly dated now. But, it's still plausible, if not as real science fiction, certainly as fantasy, and truly as allegory, and the book's real raison d'etré. Yet, a work can be wholly fantastical and succeed if its tale grips and its characters connect. Plausibility gives way to the motive- in both senses of what drives the tale and what the style accomplishes in doing so.
That all said, I have no hesitation claiming that I Am Legend is easily one of the ten best novels I have ever read- right up there with Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and a few arguments over a tale or two from William Kennedy and some others.
And yet, somehow, I am still drawn to the Vincent Price interpretation of the Robert Neville character (called Robert Morgan in The Last Man On Earth), and my sonnet Vincent Price In The Drapery Folds, for that is where our deepest terrors lie- in the mundane, in the human tendency to see a curtain rustle and expect some ghost or nosferatu to be its cause, rather than a stray breeze. This is why `the divine chaotics of wish and snowflake' is so essential to science fiction and horror. It is the within, admixed with the without, however briefly (for snowflakes are amongst the most ephemeral things in the macro-world), where horror spawns. Matheson knew it, and I Am Legend is a perfect snowflake, whose beautiful fears are forever frozen in words.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Really a collection of stories
Comment: Wanted to read this and see how it compared to the movies. Really this is the I am Legend tale and then a collection of the author's other works as well, which I have yet to read.
Overall, it was a little too much 60's theory that man is controlled by his urges not his mind for my taste but it was nice to see the payoff at the end to understand what the author really wanted the title to be.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not as good as I anticipated, unfortunately
Comment: I really wanted to like this book. Honestly, I did. I can see why the story of "I am Legend" has some serious appeal. I, at least, loved the ending, but it just couldn't make up for the disdain I had for the earlier parts. Coupled with the fact that this book is 312 pages and the story of "I am Legend" ends on page 159 means that this entire book isn't "I am Legend". Considering I wasn't a huge fan of "I am Legend", this might sound like a good thing, but the latter half of the book is filled with some incredibly bad short stories. I have no idea what this publisher was thinking by doing this.
Naturally "I am Legend" is the more famous story in this book and it is definitely the best one by a long shot. It's the story of Robert Neville a man who believes he is the last man on Earth after a plague has wiped out most of humanity and changing some into horrific vampire/undead beings. This is the story of Neville trying to overcome his plight and facing these creatures on a daily basis. Now let me just say that I can understand why people find the book so good. It's written very vividly and you can really feel the ordeal Robert Neville is going through. My problem was that I just plain didn't like Robert Neville. He flew off the handle with frustration far too much and he just did stupid things that a collected person wouldn't make. I realize that's part of who he was as a character. It's really hard to like this book when you don't like the main character since this is the sort of story that deals with isolation where the only character you really get to interact with is the main character. The world Matheson constructed was very interesting to read about and I do like what he did with it. I even ended up liking the explanation for why certain Vampire legends worked, that's what really saved this book for me.
I'll admit, I saw the movie starring Will Smith before I read this. I'm sort of torn, in a way, because I did like the movie a little better than the book, but that's solely because Will Smith played a rational and very smart Robert Neville. He didn't fly off the handle in crazy tirades. A friend of mine put it best "if I were stuck in this situation, I would want to be with the Neville from the movie, not the book". I think that aptly displays why I had a hard time liking this book. As far as the book versus the movie, it's nothing but confusing. I have no idea why they titled the movie "I am Legend". It doesn't have nearly the same creatures as in the book and it doesn't have the same ending. The lack of that ending completely invalidates the title of the movie, because the book simply ended on a brilliant note that actually fully explains the title, the movie does not.
Now these other short stories we have to suffer through at the end is just atrocious. Yes, I read every single one of them... simply so I could say I have and that my review is fully based on my experience. There is one story called "Witch War" in which Matheson goes into detail about these underage girls who display magical abilities. For whatever reason they're in a military compound and they mentally fight troops with magic before they can even engage their target. It's just a stupid story. It makes almost no sense. "Dress of White Silk" drove me insane because it made no sense at the end. I have a general idea of what happened, but I really don't know for sure. It has to do with a little girl who is obsessed with her mother, but she's dead. Then it goes off in some tangent of killing a friend. I had my girlfriend read it and she couldn't figure out what happened either, so I guess it's not just me. Then the most infuriating is "Mad House". It's a concept that this guy who is angry all the time is transmitting that anger into the things around him until the house eventually attacks him. This would have been alright if it was only a few pages, but it's a twenty plus page story with excruciating detail that I didn't care to read. The best one is probably "Person to Person" though, which was written well after the others. That's about a man who is hearing a telephone ring in his head and he eventually answers it and speaks to a voice on the other end. You eventually figure out who the voice is and it's sort of cliché, but it wasn't a bad read overall. This isn't all of them, but the others were also terrible. Having one decent story in that mix didn't help rating this book any.
Overall "I am Legend" was a pretty solid story, but the novel ended on such a bad note with the other stories. "I am Legend" is definitely an excellent tale given it's time frame, but I just couldn't fully get into it as I explained above. I hope people will understand my reasoning.
Rating for "I am Legend": 3 out of 5
Rating for Various Stories: 1 out of 5
Overall Rating: 2 out of 5
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