Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Horror
What is I Am Legend about?
Robert Neville, the last uninfected man, lives barricaded in his Los Angeles bungalow: garlic restocked, stakes lathed, generator serviced, whisky depleting. By day he kills the sleeping infected; by night they besiege the house, his former neighbour calling his name. Matheson runs the vampire through epidemiology — the bacillus, the allergic responses, the explicable folklore — while Neville's routine curdles from survival into something the book's flawless final pages force him, and the reader, to rename: to the new society rising among the infected, he is the monster who comes in daylight. The title is the verdict.
Why it matters
The foundation of modern apocalyptic horror: Romero credited it as Night of the Living Dead's seed, making it the zombie genre's grandparent; filmed three times (The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, I Am Legend), never yet with its ending intact.
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