I Am Legend (S.F. Masterworks)
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Manufacturer: Gollancz
Written By: Richard Matheson
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781857988093
ISBN: 1857988094
Label: Gollancz
Manufacturer: Gollancz
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: 1999-01-21
Publisher: Gollancz
Studio: Gollancz
Related Items
- World War Z
- The Omega Man [1972]
- The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
- I Am Legend (2 Disc Special Edition) [2007]
- Monster Island: A Zombie Novel
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant!
Comment: After watching the movie I just had to read the book, I'm a sucker for that. If I love the movie I have to find out if there was a book, and I go and get it. I have to say I totally love the movie, love Will Smith, he's great actor and in 'I Am Legend' he is brilliant!
So, I've read the book and I was not disappointed.
I was expecting it to be the same story as the movie, after all the book came first, but it isn't. It is like reading about a totally different story. A really good one at that. In the movie they took the basics and created a movie for modern day. However, I thought the book was so good I don't see why they don't make a movie that is true to the book.
In this book there's no Zombies, but Vampires, who are hunting Robert Neville and he must do whatever he can to survive. I won't say more than that. It's a short book of just 160 pages and can easily been read in a day, if you have the time to sit and read it.
I loved the authors style of writing and in some parts of the book I was taken back in memory to when I read The Fog by James Herbert and Pet Sematary by Stephen King. I saw some similarities in the style of writing. I was well and truly hooked. I loved it. :)
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you know the film, you dont know the book
Comment: This is an amazing book, I confess to it being my first encounter with the sci fi masterworks range (I'm now a total addict), that I found the cover totally intriguing and the idea that vampires could feature in a sci fi tale even more so.
Since reading the book I've seen all the movie adaptations, the Will Smith movie has nothing to do with the book and you could only say its loosely inspired by the book (no surprise to fans of Asimov), The Omega Man similarly isnt that great an adaptation either but The Last Man on Earth, a black and white movie featuring Vincent Price, does much better.
The story is that of Neville, lone human survivor in a world overtaken by vampires, it interestingly charts his existence and survival struggles in a way that couldnt fail to entertain any apocalypse or catastrophe reader but also fans of the survival horror genre in movies and games. With the full passage of time Neville adopts a scientific perspective on the vampires, what makes them tick, what is the origin of the vampire plague etc. The ensuing experiments have all sorts of angles involving social psychology, mania, psychosomatic illness and finally the viral transmission of "intelligent" diseases. While he does so to make himself a better slayer in the process he tries to answer questions about his lone survivor status.
Then one day Neville encounters another survivor and a fantastic twist is introduced into the plot, the title makes sense and the story even takes on the character of a political dystopia, Neville's plight isnt that different from that of Winston Smith, George Orwell's Last Man In Europe from 1984.
Matheson never wrote a bad book and this is no exception, I have no reservaions about recommending this to anyone, horror fans, sci fi fans, fantasy fans or just casual readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Genuine Legend..
Comment: Steven King's introduction identifies Matheson as a major influence and virtually credits him with re-inventing the modern horror genre. And rightly so.
I've only just read this (shame on me) and am amazed! It really is the granddaddy of the modern zombie genre. And of much vampire fiction too. Added to that it has several twists in the tail that are completely unexpected which put its imitators firmly in the shade (including the film).
An extraordinary achievement. A must read. It will surprise you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb.
Comment: Justifying killing - or trying to - is a more pointed argument when taken in the individual; governments cloud the simplicity with rhetoric, propoganda and patriotism; but, keep the numbers down and the subject is raw and demanding attention.
Matheson strips the numbers down to one in this book, and one has no problem in coming down on the side of Robert Neville - the book's lead, and almost only, character.
One feels his panic when he discovers his watch has stopped and cannot get back to his safe-house before sun-down; and when he smacks his car into a crowd of Vampires like a macarbre game of skittles, one feels his elation.
Matheson recruits the reader from the outset and the reader becomes an observer, living one dimension down from the physical earthbound, able to see and hear all he does - even hear his thoughts - yet is unable to intervene or advise, and that gives the work more power. It frustrates the reader; but Matheson, after sucking the reader in, turns the tables on Neville and strips him of all the moral altitude he has taken for himself, and plunges him into the role of bad guy, of the hated terrorist, and makes him an outsider, a pariah.
Matheson has no mercy for his protaganist.
I have read short stories of greater length than this novel, and the prose is thin, which is not to say it is bad, but it deals only with the here and now of the story; back-story and poetic flourishes in the prose are kept to a minimum as far as the former go, and are non-existent for the latter. It makes for a story where 99 per cent is action in the present tense, and the book could be read in one sitting, I think.
This is considered a classic of genre fiction, and rightly so.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A VERY QUICK READ!
Comment: I just couldn't put this down and it isn't typical of my preferred reading. I was completely drawn in as soon as I started it and my life went on hold until I finished it.
A very enthralling book
Summary: Brilliant!
Comment: After watching the movie I just had to read the book, I'm a sucker for that. If I love the movie I have to find out if there was a book, and I go and get it. I have to say I totally love the movie, love Will Smith, he's great actor and in 'I Am Legend' he is brilliant!
So, I've read the book and I was not disappointed.
I was expecting it to be the same story as the movie, after all the book came first, but it isn't. It is like reading about a totally different story. A really good one at that. In the movie they took the basics and created a movie for modern day. However, I thought the book was so good I don't see why they don't make a movie that is true to the book.
In this book there's no Zombies, but Vampires, who are hunting Robert Neville and he must do whatever he can to survive. I won't say more than that. It's a short book of just 160 pages and can easily been read in a day, if you have the time to sit and read it.
I loved the authors style of writing and in some parts of the book I was taken back in memory to when I read The Fog by James Herbert and Pet Sematary by Stephen King. I saw some similarities in the style of writing. I was well and truly hooked. I loved it. :)
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you know the film, you dont know the book
Comment: This is an amazing book, I confess to it being my first encounter with the sci fi masterworks range (I'm now a total addict), that I found the cover totally intriguing and the idea that vampires could feature in a sci fi tale even more so.
Since reading the book I've seen all the movie adaptations, the Will Smith movie has nothing to do with the book and you could only say its loosely inspired by the book (no surprise to fans of Asimov), The Omega Man similarly isnt that great an adaptation either but The Last Man on Earth, a black and white movie featuring Vincent Price, does much better.
The story is that of Neville, lone human survivor in a world overtaken by vampires, it interestingly charts his existence and survival struggles in a way that couldnt fail to entertain any apocalypse or catastrophe reader but also fans of the survival horror genre in movies and games. With the full passage of time Neville adopts a scientific perspective on the vampires, what makes them tick, what is the origin of the vampire plague etc. The ensuing experiments have all sorts of angles involving social psychology, mania, psychosomatic illness and finally the viral transmission of "intelligent" diseases. While he does so to make himself a better slayer in the process he tries to answer questions about his lone survivor status.
Then one day Neville encounters another survivor and a fantastic twist is introduced into the plot, the title makes sense and the story even takes on the character of a political dystopia, Neville's plight isnt that different from that of Winston Smith, George Orwell's Last Man In Europe from 1984.
Matheson never wrote a bad book and this is no exception, I have no reservaions about recommending this to anyone, horror fans, sci fi fans, fantasy fans or just casual readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Genuine Legend..
Comment: Steven King's introduction identifies Matheson as a major influence and virtually credits him with re-inventing the modern horror genre. And rightly so.
I've only just read this (shame on me) and am amazed! It really is the granddaddy of the modern zombie genre. And of much vampire fiction too. Added to that it has several twists in the tail that are completely unexpected which put its imitators firmly in the shade (including the film).
An extraordinary achievement. A must read. It will surprise you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb.
Comment: Justifying killing - or trying to - is a more pointed argument when taken in the individual; governments cloud the simplicity with rhetoric, propoganda and patriotism; but, keep the numbers down and the subject is raw and demanding attention.
Matheson strips the numbers down to one in this book, and one has no problem in coming down on the side of Robert Neville - the book's lead, and almost only, character.
One feels his panic when he discovers his watch has stopped and cannot get back to his safe-house before sun-down; and when he smacks his car into a crowd of Vampires like a macarbre game of skittles, one feels his elation.
Matheson recruits the reader from the outset and the reader becomes an observer, living one dimension down from the physical earthbound, able to see and hear all he does - even hear his thoughts - yet is unable to intervene or advise, and that gives the work more power. It frustrates the reader; but Matheson, after sucking the reader in, turns the tables on Neville and strips him of all the moral altitude he has taken for himself, and plunges him into the role of bad guy, of the hated terrorist, and makes him an outsider, a pariah.
Matheson has no mercy for his protaganist.
I have read short stories of greater length than this novel, and the prose is thin, which is not to say it is bad, but it deals only with the here and now of the story; back-story and poetic flourishes in the prose are kept to a minimum as far as the former go, and are non-existent for the latter. It makes for a story where 99 per cent is action in the present tense, and the book could be read in one sitting, I think.
This is considered a classic of genre fiction, and rightly so.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A VERY QUICK READ!
Comment: I just couldn't put this down and it isn't typical of my preferred reading. I was completely drawn in as soon as I started it and my life went on hold until I finished it.
A very enthralling book
It seems strange to find a 1954 vampire novel in Millennium's "SF Masterworks" classic reprints series. I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presents vampirism as a disease whose secrets can be unlocked by scientific tools. The hero Robert Neville, perhaps the last uninfected man on Earth, finds himself in a paranoid nightmare. By night, the bloodthirsty undead of small-town America besiege his barricaded house: their repeated cry "Come out, Neville!" is a famous SF catchphrase. By day, when they hide in shadow and become comatose, Neville gets out his wooden stakes for an orgy of slaughter. He also discovers pseudoscientific explanations, some rather strained, for vampires' fear of light, vulnerability to stakes though not bullets, loathing of garlic, and so on. What gives the story its uneasy power is the gradual perspective shift which shows that by fighting monsters Neville is himself becoming monstrous--not a vampire but something to terrify vampires and haunt their dreams as a dreadful legend from the bad old days. I Am Legend was altered out of recognition when filmed as The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. Avoid the movie; read the book. --David Langford
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