Read the first hundred pages or so of Richard Matheson’s I am Legend last night, so I guess I’m not that tired.
I’m glad I picked this up — Matheson thanks Henry Kuttner on the opening page, who you might know was a huge influence on Zelazny so, you know… connections.
It’s a good story, though the wording is sort of clumsy. I have a notion that he was going for the sort of sparse feel of The Thin Man and ended up with stoic instead. Stoic is fine for a character… it’s not so good for a book.
Still, a good read, and as the story progresses he gets more comfortable, forgets what he’s trying to sound like and things start coming across in a much more authentic voice — the bit about the dog kept me up and reading another 45 minutes longer than I’d intended to, which is all anyone really wants a reader to do.
It’s a new printing of the book, which actually includes a bunch of shorter things after I am Legend (the book’s 300 pages, and I am Legend is only 171 of it). I’m not as enthused about those as I might be — I haven’t decided if Matheson will write better stuff in a shorter format, or if he’ll treat each short story as an ‘exercise’: “With this story, I will not use any words with the letter ‘m’ in them.”
We’ll see.
(Oh, the premise of the book is that the protagonist is the last uninfected human in a world full of vampires. Touted as one of the 10 great ‘vampire’ books of all time. I can only name about… three or four ‘vampire’ books/series, so I’m not sure what kind of praise that is, but there it is nonetheless.)
Addendum: In that era, everyone smoked a hundred jillion cigarettes per hour… if they were cutting back. Just FYI.
