Should You Read I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson?

No, you should not.

Tor Books (this edition, including 10 additional short stories)
317 pages
From $5.98 on Amazon

Behold the terrors of the near future--1976! Hootchie lady vampires in skimpy dresses wander the streets, and the last man on earth barricades himself at home with a supply of good scotch, pipe tobacco, and Rachmaninov records. The horror!

I'm not the first person who thought they could trace the roots of zombie fiction back to Richard Matheson's 1954 story of Robert Neville, a California factory foreman reflecting on a world overrun by the undead. Though they swarm and surround his house, Matheson's antagonists aren't zombies; they're vampires craving after human blood, converted from the living by an airborne pathogen. Robert Neville, the steely-eyed survivor holed-up at home, is the world's last living man. Reader, beware: the manuscript bears no further resemblance to the eponymous 2007 film starring Will Smith.

This was the first time I'd read anything by Matheson, though I had very high hopes. I'm a pretty big buff of writers of the 50's and 60's: Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were producing some of their best material around this period, and the sci-fi world saw Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes and John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (later filmed as Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Matheson might not have a household name, but he's left an indelible legacy of creepy tales that continue to surface in television and film. In addition to writing The (Incredible) Shrinking Man and What Dreams May Come, Matheson was a contributing writer on some creative juggernauts; eight of his short stories were adapted for the Twilight Zone, including the famous episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Stephen King raves about Matheson in his 1981 non-fiction Danse Macabre, an online AMC FilmCritic interview with Frank Darabont, and in his introduction to Legend's 2006 re-release. Blogger critics have praised this book in particular as mesmerizing and timeless.

I had so many problems reading this book, I don't know where to begin the autopsy. Robert Neville's machismo overpowers his pragmatism, fear, and isolation in every instance of character development, and the book clunks awkwardly and aimlessly at one hyperactive speed until it runs out of avenues to explore, then resolves through implosion. Pseudo-science takes up a large portion of the story, and the author's need to bring logic to the plague detracts from the flow. The book barely sustains itself through seriously wide plot holes. Woven throughout this mess are strands of profound sexism and vague racism.

I don't understand why Matheson turns so much of the book over to the hero's search to understand the pathogen that en-vampires the world. Maybe readers in the 1953 were more entranced by the distinctions between germ, bacteria, and virus? I couldn't care less. Through careful hours poring over works in an abandoned library, Neville discovers the germ responsible for reanimating the dead and infecting blood-lust in the living. That same germ causes susceptibility to sunlight and garlic, and creates a subcutaneous, bullet-proof membrane in the infected, which is why vampires are impervious to the bullets from Neville Roberts' gun.

But where did Neville get this gun? Perhaps from the same stock where he loots his cigars, wine, lamb chops, and steaks--three years after the rest of the world has died off. Writing in the first person, Neville alludes to a generator in his garage, but never explains how he has running water, or how the tobacco never goes stale.

I can't bother going into how this book resolves; the end is just too tedious and stupid. There are a few standout elements that merit some attention: Neville's character is a pretty stark portrait of paranoia and rage in an otherwise very silly universe; and the brief appearance of a dying dog late in the book inspires empathy for the character's isolation and loneliness. Squidoo.com praised this work for the internal tension, writing that "Neville's fight is as much against himself as against the vampires."

Still unaddressed are I Am Legend's uncomfortable undercurrents of racism and sexism. In one episode of inebriated ranting, Neville equates the vampire search for life-sustaining blood with African Americans' struggle for civil rights. I'm sure I wasn't the only reader to do a double-take when the protagonist drunkenly asks himself, "Sure, sure, but would you let your sister marry one?" Mikhail Lyubansky wrote a lengthy piece on this topic for Psychology Today, but I think he gives Matheson more credit than he deserves for being clever, and less than he deserves for being obnoxious.

The sexism is way more of a problem, both in severity and frequency. When a female survivor appears one day, Neville kidnaps her and later that night contemplates raping her. "Prey," a later story which follows I Am Legend, overtly sexualizes the physical struggle of a single woman battling an African doll called "He Who Hunts":

She cried out as the knife was jabbed beneath the door, its sharp point sticking into one of her toes. She shuffled back, shifting her grip on the knob. Her robe hung open. She could feel a trickle of blood between her breasts. Her legs felt numb with pain. She closed her eyes.

Wow! Anyone got a cigarette?

I thought this book was gross, and maybe a poor introduction to an otherwise great author's substantial oeuvre. If you had another take on it or can suggest works that better represent this writer, please recommend them here!

The Living Dead 2, Edited by John Joseph Adams

Night Shade Books, 2010
496 pages
$11.89 at Barnes&Noble

Read it and creep....

This book is shockingly good. At times, I to stop reading and check the cheesy cover to make sure I was still working on the same title. The dense collection of 44 different short stories from 49 contemporary writers and collaborators presents countless variations on the theme of the Living Dead. They go by many names: walkers, moaners, smirkers, the dead, zombies and "the z-word," and they appear as figures of vengeance, divine wrath, bioterrorism, alien invasion and comedy.

The sheer diversity of vision gathered here is one of the most encouraging qualities I've ever seen in an anthology. Adams's collection satisfies my childhood nostalgia for reading ghost stories under the blankets with a flashlight, and the tales come from both career writers and new voices, male and female, giving hope to the idea that creative ideas and solid storytelling still exist. Established contributors include Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead graphic novel and AMC television series), Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth), and Max Brooks (World War Z: the granddaddy of pop-zombie resurgence). Newcomers include recent MFA graduates from University of Iowa, aspiring novelists, and even one contribution from Kyra M. Schon, the actress who played Karen Cooper, the zombie in the basement of George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead.

My favorite stories in this collection play with and distort the reanimated bogeyman-concept until it's barely recognizable. In David Moody's "Who We Used To Be," an unexplained event causes instantaneous global death and persistent consciousness and motor control, and a family of three struggles to keep their home cool and their neighbors out to stave off inevitable decomposition. David J. Schow's "Where the Heart Was" describes a betrayed husband returning again and again to attack his cheating wife and best friend. And Gary Braunbeck's "We Now Pause for Station Identification" describes zombies malingering around their favorite haunts, morphing into plant life, and converting the world into an alien habitat.

Andrew Gilstrap, writing in PopMatters, put it well when he said the contributors in this anthology knew where zombie fiction has been, and...take the genre in new directions entirely. Stories focus on sentient zombies, the newly infected wrestling with their consciences, organized armies of the undead, brain-eaters in addiction-recovery therapy, and zombies who find religion. The writing is consistently, startlingly good without--for the most part--employing gratuitous gore and violence.

Disappointments in this anthology are few and far between. Editor John Joseph Adams doesn't necessarily recommend you read the collection straight through, but you may want to skip past "Zombie Gigalo," a story on par with Palahniuk's "Guts" for gross-out factor but far beneath his storytelling craft. "He Said, Laughing" feels like it was lifted word-for-word from Scorcese's Apocolypse Now (but with zombies, get it?), and "When the Zombies Win," is a short, dull, one-dimensional portrayal of a post-human earth that reaches more for tone than narrative. For a concise tale-by-tale review of the entire collection, check out John Denardo's excellent piece in SF Signal.

It's no wonder this collection was named Fangoria's book of the month. Check it out, read it, and enjoy the ads in the back for forthcoming titles The Loving Dead and Harrison Geillor's The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten. By the time you reach Sarah Langan's final story, "Are You Trying to Tell Me This is Heaven?" even the biggest anti-zombie killjoy will be screaming for braaaaaaaiiiiins.