The Legendary I Am Legend

Dad was describing to me a book he'd read that scared him. "This guy is all alone because everyone else is a vampire. He goes out during the day and hunts them down and kills them. He hides out at night when they come around trying to get him. One day he's out hunting vampires when his watch stops and it gets to be dark before he can get back to his hiding place…"

"What happened then?"

"I don't know. The book scared me so much I stopped reading."

What Dad was describing back in the late 1950s was the novel, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. The first printing, shown above, appeared as a 1954 paperback original.

I didn't catch up to the novel until 1964 when this edition came out:

I immediately recognized it as the novel that scared Dad so much 10 years before. And rightly so. I Am Legend is itself a legend; one of the scariest horror stories ever told. Up until that time the vampire story was pretty much accepted as being good versus evil, caused by supernatural forces. Matheson's novel postulated that vampirism could be caused by non-supernatural means. In a cold war world with nuclear jitters there was already a lot of fiction about post-apocalyptic worlds, but none like this.

The paranoia in this novel is about as up front as you get. A man alone, besieged by monsters.

It had far reaching effect, right down to today. On December 17 a new movie version of I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, will be released. Earlier official movie versions have been The Last Man On Earth with Vincent Price and The Omega Man with Charlton Heston. The unofficial movies keep coming; the novel I Am Legend begat the movie, Night Of The Living Dead, which begat sequels, imitations, etc. The novel, and subsequent novels by Matheson, The Shrinking Man, A Stir Of Echoes, and Hell House kept up his tradition of telling horror stories in a new way.

He influenced writers like Stephen King, who credit him with his influence. He has written a lot of books, and has a lot of anthologies of short stories to his credit, but I Am Legend, the book that scared my dad, was the daddy of them all.