For the Snark was a Boojum

SF Masterworks #2: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the plot of the book. Completely.

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.

• I Am Legend, opening lines of Chapter 1.

We had a copy of *I Am Legend* in the house when I was growing up. I never read it. The garish, gory melodrama of the Corgi cover put me off: the lower half of a man, holding a large hammer, standing over the prone body of a pneumatic brunette. She has a stake in her chest - otherwise there is no hint of vampirism - and wears the casual but fetching outfit of a young American lady from the late 1950s. My younger brother loved the book. I was a coward; he was right. When I finally read it, perhaps twenty years later, I realised what I'd missed and kicked myself.

I Am Legend was Richard Matheson's first novel, published in 1954 at the beginning of a long and successful career. Other novels followed, many later filmed with varying degrees of success: The Shrinking Man (filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man), Hell House, Stir of Echoes and What Dreams May Come. He also wrote a great many short stories and television scripts, including such well-known Twilight Zone episodes as Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Many people would choose that as their favourite. Mine is And When the Sky Was Opened, also based on a Matheson short story ("Disappearing Act"), although by the time Rod Serling had finished with it, little of the original remained.

This is one of those foundational books that subsequent fiction has strip-mined so thoroughly that it can now feel like a cover version of itself. Its echoes are everywhere: zombie films, post-apocalyptic survival stories, lone survivors fortifying suburban houses against shambling hordes. They begin here.

Robert Neville is the last living human in Los Angeles and, possibly, the world. A plague has transformed everybody else into vampires. These vampires are however not the suave Byronic aristocrats of earlier fiction. They're reanimated, hungry, angry corpses, who are also peculiarly vulnerable to the old folkloric remedies: garlic, mirrors, crosses and stakes through the heart. Each night they collect outside Neville's fortified house and the crowd calls him out by name. The following morning, he in turn hunts the sleeping creatures, stakes them, repairs his defences and finally drinks himself numb enough to face the next sunset.

This could easily have been an American translation of a John Wyndham "cosy catastrophe", about a resourceful chap defending his house from, in this case, vampires. Matheson has little interest in writing that book - a lesson the later film adaptations might profitably have learned, but we'll come to those. Neville is not a gallant Wyndham hero, grimly doing what must be done. He's a traumatised man, increasingly alcoholic, whose survival has become its own kind of death.

There are long passages of research. Neville has no scientific training, so he works through salvaged library books and peers into microscopes, trying to discover a biological basis for vampirism. The work gives him a focus whereby he can structure his days. Matheson's prose tracks that structure perfectly. The language he uses is sturdy, flat and direct; professional in an almost journalistic way. Neville repairs his generator, strings garlic, drinks whisky and kills vampires. Matheson reports each activity in the same matter-of-fact register, making the horror of it even more effective.

Flashbacks - and one wretched late-night confession - tell us how Neville lost his wife and daughter to the plague. His wife returned from the dead, leaving Neville to stake her himself. That's the scene on the Corgi cover: sensationalised into pulp titillation, certainly, but not invented. Ben Cortman, once Neville's friend and neighbour, is among the vampires who gather outside Neville's house. But now he stands outside the window shouting abuse and trying to lure Neville out to be devoured. It puts me slightly in mind of Cheever's The Swimmer. It shares the same queasy discovery that the people you thought you knew have turned on you, and that the fabric of suburban life was never as strong as it looked.

Stephen King, whose debt to Matheson is considerable, put it well:

He fired my imagination by placing his horrors not in European castles and Lovecraftian universes, but in American scenes I knew and could relate to. "I want to do that," I thought. "I must do that."

The book succeeded without ever quite winning over the Campbellian constituency. Damon Knight, forever a master of missing the point, wrote in an essay called "Half-Bad Writers":

The book is full of good ideas, every other one of which is immediately dropped and kicked out of sight. The characters are child's drawings, as blank-eyed and expressionless as the author himself in his back-cover photograph. The plot limps.

Knight also thought the scientific rationalisations childish, as if Matheson had answered each editorial query with the first notion that entered his head. He was not entirely wrong about the method. What he missed was the result. My reading is that Matheson, always strong on ideas, began with a question: what if vampirism had a scientific explanation? Once he'd established the idea of a hominus vampiris (as he calls it), the ending almost writes itself. Vampires who constitute a new species rather than a rabble of supernatural monsters will build a society. That society will turn the creature who hunts its members in their sleep into a myth, just as ours did with Dracula.

Matheson works backwards from that hook. This is a very short novel and the prose is lean. There isn't much plot between Neville's starting point and his destination. Hence the research, the flashbacks and the slow accumulation of despair.

In the final act, Neville meets Ruth, who seems to be another survivor. A reader in the 1950s might reasonably expect the Wyndham heroine, a plucky female companion who appears to make the hero feel better about himself while he gets on with the story's central arc. But oh no. Ruth is one of them.

Ruth belongs to a new society of infected humans who can control their condition. These "new men" know Neville as the daylight killer who murders their kin as they sleep. He's the legend their mothers use to frighten their children.

So the title is a trick. The snark, it turns out, is a boojum. While Neville was holed up in his suburban fortress, methodically piecing together scientific explanations from stolen library books, the story he thought he occupied turned itself inside out. He's ultimately devoured, not by the vampires, but by the narrative. In his last moments, Neville understands what has happened to him. He has become to this new humanity what Dracula was to the old: an impossible nightmare figure left over from a dead world.

I Am Legend is the model for modern horror's fondness for altered perspectives and moral inversions: the recognition that monstrosity often depends upon which side of the barricade you occupy. It's a slim book, barely more than a novella. But it still contains more genuine thought about survival - what it costs, and what it turns us into - than most thousand-page epics.

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The book has been officially adapted for cinema three times: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007). All three films are terrible, by which I mean that they depart from the book and are worse for doing so. Will Smith's 2007 film, made in the age of vast budgets and star power, has the least excuse. It is difficult to believe that anyone involved read beyond the back-cover blurb.

George A. Romero, meanwhile, unceremoniously helped himself to Matheson's setting and assumptions for Night of the Living Dead (1968).¹ I Am Legend is therefore the great progenitor - the elder ancient - of the entire zombie-film bloodline. Without it, perhaps there would be no The Walking Dead and no The Last of Us. Even the producers of the original Fallout named it as an influence.

The cover of the current SF Masterworks edition is "based on an illustration by Jim Thiesen". The previous black-spined edition credited Thiesen fully. This means that whoever lazily slammed his image through a crappy filter - as happened with so many of the early yellow-spined Masterworks - is claiming an awful lot of credit. That cover is itself only a detail from Thiesen's original artwork, which was produced for the US Tor edition and, even then, edited and inverted. In 2011, Thiesen described his unhappiness at the progressive erasure of his work.² I don't blame him. Tor eventually used the complete illustration for its edition accompanying the 2007 film.

Graham Sleight's introduction to the yellow edition is relatively brief, as Masterworks introductions often are. The Folio Society edition offers a more expansive one by Joe Hill, along with beautiful illustrations by Dave McKean. As a completist and a madman, I own all of them. If you have the money, buy the Folio.

¹ In an interview, Matheson recalled: "I met George Romero who held up his hands in mock defense and said, 'It didn't make any money!' I ran across his film on TV one night and thought, When did they make my novel into a film again?" See the full interview.

² The entire I Am Legend Archive website is worth exploring; it is a comprehensive resource on the novel and its many adaptations.