I Am Legend, and the Horror of Loneliness

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a sci fi horror novella, first published in 1954 about Robert Neville, the (presumed) last man on Earth after a quick spreading disease turns everyone into vampires.

The horror doesn't really come from the vampires. A lot of the ones Robert comes across are zombie like with the traditional vampire limitations (sunlight, garlic, stakes, etc) so if he makes it back to his guarded home before night, he is relatively safe. The horror comes from seeing the world through the perspective of a hopeless man who is too miserable to want to keep living but too scared to die.

Robert is a very miserable man and while I normally have no problem with unlikable main characters, I'll admit he had my eyes rolling so hard at first. Like seriously, the world has pretty much ended and his biggest grievance seems to be that he'll never have sex again. He thinks about sex a lot. I kind of just chalked it up to earlier sci fi male writers really over sexualizing women in their works but as I read on, yeah… never being able to receive affection (physically and emotionally) would be very bleak.

I Am Legend was written over 60 years ago but the horror feels very modern, and not just because of Covid (though, the flash back to the very beginning of the outbreak felt very familiar). After a cataclysmic event, Robert is angry and depressed that his life has been taken away from him. His friends, coworkers, and neighbors are all enemies now. He can't trust anyone. He is paranoid, depressed, and scared. He is furious at how unfair his life is. He yearns for the past. He justifies his actions as necessary for survival. These are all feelings and emotions that feel very familiar because we've either felt them ourselves or because we see others going down that depressing path.

So, if you like psychological horror, unreliable narrators, and villain origin stories, I definitely recommend this book. If you like vampire stories… it read more like a zombie story than vampires for me, but I did really like how Matheson tried to explain the vampire lore and tropes with science.