Review: I Am Legend

For a book ostensibly about the survival, destruction, and evolution of the human race as we know it, I Am Legend left me feeling... underwhelmed. It wasn't that the vampires weren't frightening or that the stakes weren't high enough or that there wasn't enough action. As far as I'm concerned, it did fine on those fronts. The vampires were as frightening as any iteration of the toothy, blood-sucking fiends. Out to steal souls and convert the very last remnant of humanity to a creature of the night, they did plenty of lurking, but they attacked, too, on a couple of fairly epic occasions.

No, the problem was that I didn't care about Robert Neville.

From the first page to the last, I could hardly be bothered if he lived or died. All his rages, his emotional torments and despairs left me cold. It felt like sitting in an airport terminal, jet-lagged, watching a child throw a tantrum from the other end of the gate. I'm sure what he feels is important to him, but no need for me to get involved. Nothing I can do about it.

Since our assignment this week in the Writers Workshop of Horror was all about beginnings, I'll blame my problem with I Am Legend on its opening lines.

The first sentence isn't bad: "On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back" (Matheson 13). The book would almost have had me hooked, but then I came to the last sentence of the first scene: "For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him" (15). Oh, no.

From there on, Robert Neville becomes a stereotype of machismo writ large. He drinks whisky. He fantasizes about women. He fails to clean up after himself in a way that shouldn't be gendered but is, and he smokes a lot of cigarettes. A lot. Already, my ability to sympathize with this character was slipping.

I like plenty of books with cis-male protagonists, but I'll admit I have little patience with "heroes" who lack the basic decency to treat non-men as human beings. In Neville's case, it's cis-women. He thinks about them a lot. He fantasizes about his dead wife. He lusts after hot vampire babes. He cries over his dead daughter. He collects their victimized bodies. He murders them in cold blood. He doesn't meet a live one till the end of the book, and even then he traumatizes her before she can get a word in. (And give me a break—her fluttering, torn white dress? How does he not get that this is wish fulfillment to a comical degree?)

I get that he's not a perfect guy. He's distraught, alone, in a constant battle for his very survival. I would forgive his misogyny (perhaps reluctantly) if I had a reason to believe he deserved my good grace. Imperfect protagonists are great, I love them, but they need a redeeming quality. I lost patience with Robert Neville the minute he smashed his first whisky glass, and nothing followed on its heels to rekindle my sympathies or spark my forgiveness. Was his redeeming quality meant to be his refined taste in classical music? The loss of the wife he seemed to take for granted until she was gone? The very fact of his loneliness?

Maybe readers in 1954 had a higher tolerance for Aryan men smoking and drinking and smashing glasses on the floor. Maybe my tolerance is just abnormally low. All I can say is that I wish Matheson had given Robert Neville some attribute that could have won him my support. Maybe if he had risked his life to save an innocent who died anyway, burdening him with the guilt... But instead, we have a man who has survived for no reason other than the dumb luck of random immunity, enacting the behaviors of violent and abusive men, seemingly redeemed only by his collection of vinyl records.

By the time I made it to the end of the book, I was cheered by the final revenge the living dead were able to take on Neville, executing him for murdering so many of their own. It made all of Neville's unsympathetic qualities seem intentionally ascribed rather than merely reflective of the author's own biases. I was honestly relieved to know that Neville was meant to come off as callous, arrogant, and entirely unable to envision ways of approaching the world different from his own. Still, I wish the twist had come as a shock, rather than a relief. I wish I had begun to care for Neville, that I regretted the necessity of his death or at least grappled with a little ambiguity of feeling. But from the beginning, I felt so alienated from his character, so unable to invest emotionally in his drunk, horny, misogynistic plight, that the end left me as cold as the beginning. For ultimately, I am a woman, I am not alone, and these things have no importance to me.


Citations: Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. Orb, 1995.