The Eighth Book of 2026: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
Started March 21, 2026
Finished March 24, 2026
Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend spawned the Will Smith movie of the same name, the 1971 Charlton Heston flick The Omega Man and the 1964 Vincent Price film The Last Man On Earth. The Omega Man was memorable, if only for the interracial love story between Heston’s and Rosalind Cash’s characters. I may have seen the Will Smith version, but if so it impressed me so little I might as well not have, and I’d never even heard of the Vincent Price vehicle.
But this is a book review, not a movies review. I supposed I find it easier to talk about the movies, though I'm only certain of seeing one of them, because the book was…meh. Not much like The Omega Man at all, which had a better version of the story and a better ending as well.
This was Matheson’s first novel, and I was surprised to read the Wikipedia articles on the book and the movies derived from it and see how wide an influence it had. Though it’s a vampire story, it inspired George Romero to invent the zombie movie, and originated the idea of a “scientific basis” of vampirism, moving away from the supernatural origins of earlier vampire tales.
My main problem with the book was the main character, Robert Neville. The book was written in the mid-1950s, so I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that the character seems such an embodiment of that era — tough, hard-drinking, disdainful of ideas not his own, dismissive of women outside of his own family. To Matheson’s credit, these aren’t just blind tropes, but important elements of the character, dealt with one by one as the story goes on.
I’ll admit I found the story interesting as a study of someone utterly isolated, literally the last man on earth. It was stark in its portrayal of alcoholism, grief, and despair, punctuated by moments of hope. But that doesn’t make me like the character, and the only thing that kept me reading was the promise of a short novel, which dragged pretty badly in places, as if Matheson was struggling to make it novel-length. The book didn’t end with the sense of hope I was looking for.
