Why Not To Read A Book's Beginning: A Review of "I Am Legend"

If I hadn’t been assigned I Am Legend by Richard Matheson for school, I would have given it a few pages chance, but after that, I would have put it down and never picked it back up. This book being an assignment is the only reason I finished it.

If the book should had started at part 1 chapter 5, I would have been able to continue reading it with ease. If it had started at part 2 chapter 12, I would have eagerly eaten up every page. However, it started at part 1 chapter 1, and after every chapter I had to put the book down and do something to keep myself from falling asleep.

Don’t get me wrong, I know exactly why the author did what he did. The vampire women tempting Neville played on the stereotype of vampires being seductive. The monotonous repetition of the days, and the women, the whiskey, the cigarettes, the books, all of them are meant to make the reader feel the repetition and exhaustion that Neville felt on a daily basis.

But also, those are the parts that I loathed while reading this book. The sexual desperation didn’t make sense to me when he could easily take care of his arousal himself. It may just be me, but I wouldn’t be thinking about sex that much when it had only initially been 5 months alone, and he had recently had his wife and daughter die. Dead wife would kind of kill the mood, wouldn’t it? Yet, over and over, the women, the women, the women. The books states, “They’d forced celibacy on him,” (19) and yet later in the book when there is a woman present, he concludes that sex, “doesn’t matter anymore,” (130). This could be seen as character progression, but to me it’s too contradictory to be believable. I found it impossible to deal with a desperate and misogynistic, lustful man for another page. He talks about how if Ruth had come earlier, “he might have violated her,” (136). Not a character I sympathize with or am interested in.

Speaking of the women, the repetition in the first and second parts merely forced me to take breaks between chapters because it was so hard to keep reading. In the first 9 pages of the story, he mentions cigarettes 4 times, and whiskey just as much. The book was a struggle to trudge through until around chapter 13, when the dog introduced and subsequently dies, and the plot begins to actually take off. Once I reached that point, I finished the book easily in one sitting, and enjoyed doing so.

I may be of the less popular opinion, but I found the ending satisfying. Neville going being shown as a mass murderer of a new mutated race and becoming the new legend himself I found a wonderful twist. This is one reason I liked the alternate ending to the movie I Am Legend, because it showed that the humans were the real monsters for treating the vampires so poorly. However, my ideal plot for this tale would be taking the movie beginning where we get attached to Neville’s family and dog, but pair it with the book ending, because the movie ending where he dies as a war hero didn’t do it for me.

In the end, I cared about two characters in this whole book. The dog and Ben Cortman. I was upset by both of their deaths. That’s what I look for in a book, the ability to evoke emotion from me, no matter which emotion that is. Neville and Ruth and the vampires didn’t do that to me.

If I were to recommend this book to my sister, who loves science fiction and medical jargon, I would tell her not to start at the beginning.