I Am Legend

, 19:42pm

I recently finished reading "I Am Legend", a novel written by Richard Matheson in 1954.

Actually, before reading the book I watched the movie "I Am Legend", with a wonderful Will Smith, in 2007 and I found it intriguing, even if I'm not a fan of science fiction....

Then, about a month ago, a watched the movie "28 Days Later", by Danny Boyle, which left me quite anxious and upset.

Well, the novel "I Am Legend" is a well written story about the very last man on the world, Robert Neville, who survives a terrible bacterial infection which turns people into vampires. During the epidemic, Robert (who is immune) loses his beloved wife Virginia and their young daughter Kathy: he remains completely alone, whit the only comfort of wine and classical music, and he must protect himself from the night attack of vampires.

For this reason, he spends every day of his sad life repairing his home's damages (caused by vampires during night), finding and killing sleeping vampires with the aim to eliminate all of them and having continuous flashbacks of his previous life and his dead family (which serve to explain what happened to the reader). This is an agonizing and hopeless way to leave which lasts 3 years.

Differently from the homonymous movie, which presents an optimistic end as Robert creates a vaccine to save other survived humans and re-establish the "old race", in the book everything is hopeless: there is any other survived human and also the death of Robert's wife is more harrowing and cruel with respect to the movie.

One day, Robert meets a woman, Ruth, who pretends to be human but actually she is a member of the new society of semi-vampires who are about to govern the world.

The new society decide to imprison and kill Robert by execution, because he was the killer of many of them. Ruth meets Robert before the execution to explain him what is going to happen and why and she gives him two pills to fall asleep and have a quite sweet death.

Robert, at the very end of the story, looks from the window of his prison at the people waiting for his death and perfectly understand: they are look at him with fear and horror as he is no more the last right man in a world of strange and dangerous creatures, now he's the deviation from normality, an example of old humanity who murdered the member of the new race.

Obviously, he has to die. But surely, he is a legend.

I strongly suggest this book: it's impressing and touching.

Link to Wikipedia "I Am Legend" (the novel): link