I Am Legend

I ended up taking a break and reading I Am Legend all in one gulp. I have to admit it was reassuring. I was really beginning to worry there that my general reading rate wasn't where I thought it was, but I managed 160 pages in one day with no problems.

I Am Legend showed up due to one incident  ten years ago that somehow stuck in my memory. For some reason the Will Smith movie came up and Nathan asked me what I thought about the differences from the book. This was the first I knew of the book and obviously Nathan just assumed that I had read it.

Having read it now, it has very little to do with the movie. The Will Smith movie is good. It is one of my favorite zombie flicks but there are no zombies in the book. The book has vampires. That being said, the movie did preserve many of the themes. I found the idea of isolation particularly difficult to shake. Usually in these apocalyptic stories, it seems like you have a small band striving for survival. In I Am Legend  it is just Robert Neville under siege by hordes of vampires. As far as he knows he's the last human left in the world. In many ways it's more about the psychology of isolation and what makes a monster monstrous than a vampire story.