I Am Legend: Rating: 4 stars

The only survivor of a vampire pandemic tries to stay alive and find a cure.

I Am Legend (Richard Matheson)
Written by Richard Matheson
Fiction · Science Fiction
Reviewed September 3, 2007

I expected a book about the last living (read: not undead) survivor of a mysterious plague that turns all of humanity into vampires would be right up my alley… and it kind of was. Kind of. Plots like this, though, should reach out of the book and grab you by the throat (and bite down, and suck your blood, and—erm, sorry), and this one just… didn’t. There was nothing wrong with it that I could pin down, exactly; it was well-paced and well-thought-out, and the matter-of-fact approach to humanity’s downfall was effectively chilling. Something about it, though, had the musty smell of very old sci-fi, and while that’s not in itself a bad thing, it inevitably leaves the reader with a creeping sense of deja vu and the distracting aftertaste of the era in which it was written. Maybe I’ve just come across the “last human on Earth vs. the UNDEAD ZOMBIES!!!” plotline one too many times. It’s definitely worth a read, though; if the tone of this review is more personally disappointed than appropriately laudatory, it’s because I had heard that this book would really rock my world, and it didn’t. But then, neither did Dracula.