Richard Neville is the sole survivor of a plague. He has burned the neighboring houses to the ground and boarded up his windows. He forages and loots the city for sustenance and his means of survival, ensuring he is indoors by sunset. For Neville is not alone: the victims of the pestilence are around him still, neither alive nor dead, for they have turned into vampires... They come by night, braving Neville's barricades of garlic and crucifixes, striving to break into his fortress, while by daylight he tracks the fiends to their sleeping places and stakes their hearts. Raiding libraries, Neville begins a study of medicine. Eventually he discovers that the outbreak of vampirism is caused by a bacterial infection, a germ that is killed by sunlight. Is there time to find a cure?

I Am Legend is a sterling example of the kind of SF that is often popularly categorized as horror. This 'SF horror' is common in literature and film, using rationalist and scientific explanations for its explorations of fear, while the other types of horror use the supernatural or real life events as inspiration. Matheson is celebrated in the world of cinema as virtually all his novels have been filmed. I Am Legend has been filmed twice, neither version particularly satisfying. More importantly, the novel was arguably a source of inspiration for a whole subgenre of SF horror movies featuring flesh-eating zombies that began with George Romero's masterful Night of the Living Dead, which shares details of setting and the use of a scientific rationale with I Am Legend. Matheson's stark, gripping writing can be deeply moving: the greatest fear in his universe is that of utter loneliness. Matheson's concern for his characters - however doomed - illuminates everything he writes and he is always at pains to argue the tremendous importance of human dignity no matter how appalling his protagonists' situations.

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