Two ideas jolt him from his alcoholic malaise: 1) the faint possibility that “others like him existed somewhere” (18). And her return… And when the despair builds he slips back into the routine again: “reading-drinking-soundproof-the-house” (21). When he dreams about Virginia his “fingers gripped the sheet like frenzied talons” (11). He deeply loved his wife Virginia and his young baby Kathy. Intermixed with Neville’s daily ritual are intense moments of disillusion and sadness as he remembers the domestic happiness before the disease within the same walls he still occupies. The facts about the vampires seem straight from gothic legends of the past: “their staying inside by day, their avoidance of garlic, their death by stake, their reputed fear of crosses, their supposed dread of mirrors” (16). Their need was their only motivation” (12). The female vampires attempt to cajole him from his house with lewd acts: “there was no union among them. Richard Neville, a tattooed war veteran mysteriously immune to the vampiric affliction sweeping America, spends his days lathing stakes, traveling short distances from his home killing vampires, hanging garlic, listening to Beethoven, and drinking. The Rituals of Solace and the Path out of the Haze (*spoilers*)
And I’m somewhat glad I did! While the physical onslaught of vampiric zombies didn’t interest me, the main thrust of the narrative concerns the mechanisms of grief and sexual frustration in the burning wreckage of one-time domestic bliss. I’m the first to admit that I picked up the novel entirely due to its historical importance. The subject of the novel–man attempts to survive an onslaught of vampires, caused by bacterial infection, that act like smart(er) zombies in a post-apocalyptic wasteland–normally isn’t my cup of tea. Romero and Danny Boyle, game designers such as Tim Cain ( Fallout), and countless authors.
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) is an influential SF vampire/zombie novel that spawned three film adaptations (I’ve watched the first two) and inspired directors such as George A.
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