I Am Legend was one of the first, and certainly the most brilliant, fusions of horror and science fiction. Its powerful and disturbing reworking of the vampire myth has made it a classic and enduring novel that has had a profound impact on generations of writers.
Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood.
By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn.
'The most clever and riveting vampire novel since Dracula' Dean Koontz
'An inspiration to me' Stephen King
Author
About Richard Matheson
Richard Matheson (1926-2013). He began publishing SF with his short story Born of Man and Woman which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950. I Am Legend was published in 1954 and subsequently filmed as The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston. Matheson wrote the script for the film The Incredible Shrinking Man, an adaptation of his second SF novel The Shrinking Man (published in 1956). The film won a Hugo award in 1958. He wrote many screenplays (e.g. The Fall of the House of Usher) as well as episodes of The Twilight Zone. He continued to write short stories and novels, some of which formed the basis for film scripts, including Duel, directed by Steven Spielberg in 1971. Further SF short stories were collected in The Shores of Space (1957) and Shock! (1961). His other novels include Hell House (1971) filmed as the legend of Hell House in 1973), Bid Time Return (1975), Earthbound (1982) and Journal of the Gun Years (1992). A film of his novel What Dreams May Come (1978) was released in 1998, starring Robin Williams. A collection of stories from the 1950s and 1960s was released in 1989 as Richard Matheson: Collected Stories. Matheson died in June, 2013, at the age of eighty-seven.