I Am Legend

Author: Richard Matheson

There have been a host of novels about the last man on Earth, but usually they are isolated, exploring a world denuded of people. But what if the last man wasn't alone? What if the others had risen as if from the dead and were all around him?When a pandemic strikes, Robert Neville is immune, but everyone else falls victim. But the disease doesn't kill, rather it turns people into something resembling vampires. By night, Neville barricades himself in his home, using garlic, mirrors and crucifixes to keep away his vampiric neighbours. But since exposure to sunlight kills those infected, he can spend the days out and about, scavenging for food and researching the causes of the disease. He becomes a successful vampire killer, until a new strain of vampire emerges, ones that can bear short periods in the sunlight and who are attempting to build a new society.In a sense this is just an updating of Bram Stoker's Dracula, or a very early precursor of the zombie apocalypse novels ushered in by Max Brooks'sWorld War Z; but it is also a variant on the last man novels that go back to The Last Man by Mary Shelley or After London by Richard Jeffries. Whichever way you read it, I Am Legend is itself a legend, a story that has entered our consciousness, a story that will keep you reading. In 2012, the Horror Writers Association declared I Am Legend the vampire novel of the century. Though really, there's no contest. It's a startling, visceral, thrilling read that stands head and shoulders above any other vampire novel.

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Alternative Choice
Richard Matheson wrote not one but two indisputable classics of the genre. Alongside I Am Legend you also have to read The Shrinking Man. After accidentally being exposed to a radioactive spray, Scott Carey begins to shrink at a rate of approximately 1/7th of an inch every day. At first the loss is so gradual that he hardly notices, but in time, because he is shorter, he starts to lose the respect of his family and is subject to taunts by local youths. But the shrinkage continues, until he is chased by the family cat, attacked by a spider, and engages in a vicious battle with a towering black widow spider. And still the shrinking continues.