He spends all his time learning about vampires, feels sexually attracted to female vampires, and repeatedly expresses sympathy for them. But although Neville despises vampires and considers them a threat to his very existence, he’s curiously drawn to them. He’s terrified of vampires, and for good reason: Every night, they gather outside his house and yell for him to come outside (presumably so that they can bite him and infect him with their vampire plague). In the year 1976, Robert Neville navigates the city of Los Angeles, looking for sleeping vampires to kill with a wooden stake. One of Matheson’s most important points about otherness is that the Other is both repulsive and attractive. As I Am Legend goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that there are no real heroes or villains in the book: just two groups (humans and vampires), each of which fears, and is equally alien to, the “Other.” Instead, Matheson uses Neville’s interactions with the vampires to study the concept of “otherness”-the way that one group interacts with and conceives of a radically different group. However, the book does not simply glorify Neville and demonize the vampires.
Matheson’s novel is set in a futuristic version of Los Angeles, in which Robert Neville, the last man left on Earth, fights against a terrifying race of vampires.
But unlike most works of horror, I Am Legend is not a black-and-white tale of “us versus them” in other words, a story in which a hero fights off a monstrous villain.
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is a science fiction adventure and a terrifying horror story.
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