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|  | | | Customer Reviews: | | | Average Customer Review:
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0 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 A deceiving title Feb 17, 2010
I know that not all movies are gonna resemble the book. Sometimes the movie is far from the book. This book is far far far from the movie. I dont know how they made a movie from this book but it's 100% different. And there are all these different stories that have nothing to do with what I am Legend was supposed to be about. There is nothing that states there are different stories mixed in which I may also add make no sense. I wish I could return this, it was a big disappointment.
0 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 I am Legend book Feb 12, 2010
This book is nowhere even close to as good as the movie. I have never read a book which was made into a movie in which the movie was better than the book, until now.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
A Majority of One Feb 12, 2010
My sister and I recently did a literary quid pro quo - she read my favorite novel, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, and I read one of her favorites - I Am Legend. Not being much of a horror fan and having already seen several films based on the story (which sis assures me are all totally off the mark), I'll admit I was a bit leery going in.
But I've come to discover that this is so much more than a spooky tale of vampires/zombies. Matheson wrote this short novel in the midst of the Cold War and during the height of McCarthyism. In addition to the constant (albeit largely imagined) threat of communism, the status quo was beginning to be challenged by the burgeoning civil rights and feminist movements. The middle class suburban white male was feeling threatened and, in many ways, this book reads like a paranoid redneck's worst nightmare. After reading it, I'm extremely surprised that two of the most well-known film adaptations/interpretations (I Am Legend and Night of the Living Dead) starred African-American actors. That right there suggests to me that the filmmakers missed the point entirely.
Robert Neville is the lone survivor of some sort of plague that has infected every other human on Earth. Some of the plague victims are living, some are un-dead, but they all come out at night to quench their thirst for human blood. During the day Neville roams the suburban California landscape dispatching the vampires as they sleep with hand carved wooden stakes. Every night, he barricades himself in his home while they cluster outside pounding on the walls and moaning his name. Typical horror story, right?
But look a bit closer.
Spread of the plague has been hastened by the fall-out from some vaguely referenced nuclear explosion(s). At one point, Neville himself ponders the demonization of the vampire race, likening them to minorities who "...are loathed because they are feared," before mocking his own compassion toward them with, "Sure, sure...but you wouldn't want your sister to marry one." He holds a particular hostility toward the women, mainly because he lusts for them, and his neighbor, Ben Cortman, the vampire who calls out to him by name, is a Jew. In a particularly creepy scenario near the end of the story, he describes the enjoyment he gets from hunting for the well-hidden Cortman each day. Not so funny, when you consider this was written less than ten years after the fall of the Third Reich. This is a man who spends his entire existence trying, literally, to beat back the alien hordes from his doorstep. Naturally, his battle is a futile one.
Robert Neville is a man clinging to his carefully preserved little world even as he realizes that his time has come and gone. The Earth has been overrun by "the other" and he is no longer in charge. He is now the minority...loathed because he is feared.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Pretty Good Jan 24, 2010
I do a lot of driving so I purchase Audio Cds to keep me entertained.
I did enjoy this book. It wasn't the movie as I thought. This book is the original.
Not so legendary, but a descent read Jan 07, 2010
This novel provides an interesting look at the human instinct to survive. It also has interesting themes about xenophobia, civil rights, war, and microbiology all wrapped up in a rather far-fetched world swarming with ultra-violent vampires. I didn't really care for the narrator, and a lot of the "science" seemed pretty ridiculous, but I enjoyed this novel for it's atmospheric settings and it's willingness to push the "what if vampires were real" envelope about as far as it could have gone, given the book's production date.
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