Rating: 
Summary: The greatest vampire story, period
Review: A man alone in the world of vampires lives to learn what they are and what happened to the world. It is frightening, intelligent, touching and tragic. This story is much much bigger than its hundred pages. I can't stress enough how important this book is for the reader of horror. It truly defines what the vampire is and why. Absototalutely wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting Adventure
Review: I read this book after I found out it was the book that inspired George Romero to create a black and white classic Night of The Living Dead.
This book contains I am Legends as well as some short stores. I have read all of them. The short stories in this book are not very interesting, and are not very sophisticated.
The "I Am Legend" however is a gem.
You follow the daily life a man who has barricaded his house from monsters who have once been the people he knew.
What I liked the most is the vivid describtions of the man's feelings and thinking process as he goes through memories, books, and photographs.
His encounters with the monsters are frightening.
The ending and the explanation of what has really happened is the most unexpected part.
Rating:
Summary: A great parable of Existential man in a conformist society
Review: I must confess, after reading a few chapters I believed this novella was another parable about the HUAC and McCarthy's political reign of terror. This story was written in 1954 and a similar theme: the lone individual standing up to hysterical mobs that sprouted overnight, had been addressed in films such as "High Noon" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (based on a Finney short story).
However, when I finished the story, I was convinced that a previous reviewer made a more accurate assessment. _I Am Legend_ is a pure existential novel, along the lines of Camus's _The Plague_ and _the Stranger_.
Robert Neville is the _involuntary_ and rather pathetic, disempowered survivor of a plague that transformed the human race into a race of blood-sucking vampires. The plague also took his wife, daughter and best friend.
Every night his former friend leads a small group of vampires who torment Neville and remind him he is less than a man and not much more than a cornered animal. In his alienation, despair and anger Neville sinks deep into drink and kills vampires during the daytime wherever he finds them sleeping and vulnerable.
In a sad episode, the lonely Neville, desperate for companionship, reaches out to a stray dog.
Neville, much like an addict, finally hits rock bottom. He resolves to overcome his ignorance and the centuries of superstition and scepticism that helped the plague spread. He studies science to understand the rational causes of the plague and the vampires.
In the process, Neville empowered by knowledge--alone but no longer lonely--understands himself, the vampire and the new culture of fear and violence of the ascending specie. Neville accepts reality for what it is and determines to play the hand he has been dealt. He loses his fear of death, an inevitability and a constant in the human condition.
Neville, in a deft touch of irony, realizes that by _choosing_ to transform himself into a sober, deliberate, understanding and fearless individual, he has acquired the very qualities that make him an outsider in the newborn, conformist order.
Yet, he realizes he is the better man for it. This existential man accepts and courageously confronts his fate, the common fate of all mankind, and in turn bequeaths to the new masters of the earth the unique gift he has discovered within himself.
This Nietzschean transformation makes Neville more than a man, he becomes a legend.
Ordinarily, the horror genre does nothing for me. After two pages of Stephen King, I set the book down. I much prefer the romance of SF, from _The Time Machine_ and _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ to _Childhood's End_ and _Ender's Game_.
Who would have thought that in the vampire genre, by definition stories of cold, dead blood-suckers, one would find a touching story about the promise of the lone individual being open to life's existential possibilities? Matheson deserves high praise for his accomplishment.
_I Am Legend_ deserves to be read--today, now, here--where, frankly, a disempowered citizenry is spooked into silence, anger and withdrawal by (unnaturally propagated) fears of the so-called "War on Terror."
Rating:
Summary: Apocalyptic
Review: My first introduction to I am Legend was as a child in the 70's via the old Black and White Vincent Price movie based on the novel. If you're a fan of the apocalypse, vampires, plague or survival tales then this is a must have!! Imagine a world destroyed by plague and you seem to be the only survivor ....at least the only survivor with half a mind left. Wife...gone...child...gone...best friend...gone(almost)....just you and your canned food ...oh and of course the angry horde of seeming zombies who just want to kill you because you are alive. Rumors have been flying rampant and there is a script out there for a movie already that was originally going to star the "Govenator".
Rating: 
Summary: 3 stars for "I am Legend" and 5 stars for the short stories
Review: I have been a big fan of Richard's work on The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling's Night Gallery, but have never read any of his actually works until I picked up this book. "I am Legend" has influenced many greats from George Romero to Stephen King, but for some reason or another this book didn't blow me away like I was hoping it would. First off, the vampires are basically just talking zombies that drink blood and are afraid of garlic and crosses. Personally, I think Romero's vision of alienation and horror in the films "Dawn of the Dead" and "Night of the Living Dead" is much suprior to that of "I am Legend's." Second off, I hated the ending. I will not go into details, but I was disappointed and was left scratching my head at the logic of it. The book is still a pretty decent read. My favorite parts were Neville's relationship with befriending the dog and I also liked how the female vampires tried to lure Neville outside by using their sex appeal. The short stories (at least 7 of them) on the other hand are absoultly brillant. Espically, "From Shadowed Places", "Witch War", "Buried Talants", "Prey", "The Funeral", "Dance of the Dead", and "Mad House." The other stories are average at best, but these are the real keepers. "From Shadowed Places" is one of the most creepy and unnerving things I have ever read. "The Funeral" was always one of the most charming Night Gallery segments, and the short story is just as good. And "Mad House" is funny, demented, and horrifying all rolled up in one. I think I like Richard more as short story writer.
Rating:
Summary: More than great...
Review: The story 'I AM LEGEND' is a must for any vampire library and is the story used to make the film, 'The Last Man On Earth'. It is dark, tragic and enjoyable to read. Robert Neville is as close to a real person that a fictional character can get, a person trapped between the logic of his mind and the new dark age that has fallen outside his house, a new age of vampires. This story ALONE is a great reason for buying this book, but wait, there's more. 10 other stories within its covers will delight and entertain you. In fact, as most of them have been on TV(or the big screen) in one form or the other, they already have.
Richard Matheson is one of the major sources for many horror stories dealing with the undead, having influenced such authors as Stephen King and 'I AM LEGEND' is one of the many books that inspired the creation of 'Vampire: The Masquerade'.
Even the cover of the book I have, is cool, good artwork, so why not buy it?
Rating:
Summary: Classic Novella
Review: The only complaint I have of this book is that it was too short. Otherwise it has swiftly become among one of the best vampire stories I have ever had the fortune to read. Far from being a typical vampire tale, Matheson takes the vampire out of its Victorian era setting and Gothic castles and into the streets of your mundane suburbanite life; wandering aimlessly and mindlessly through shopping marts and supermarkets seeking for living blood to sustain them, these vampires have more in common with George Romero's zombies than to Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Incredibly, superstition plays no part in Matheson's dark tale of these ambling mindless children of the night, as the story's struggling hero experiments scientifically on the zombiefied vampires, discovering that the ultimate cause of vampirism was a parasitic germ. Matheson satisfyingly tosses out the long held and cliched use in literature of religious artifacts to repell vampires and instead explains his vampires' revulsion toward them to be psychological rather than by any innate divine power that they might contain. Philosophically, this book could be looked at as a thinly concealed venture into existentialism.
In any case, I advise anyone who enjoyed Romero's zombie films and Stephen King's The Stand to pick up this book, I almost guarantee you will not regret the choosing of it.
Rating:
Summary: zombieTREASURES/fozzils from the sixties
Review: survival, inWITHIN againstYOURSELF a NITEMARE/NITETIME ONSLAUGHT, delerious tremors alcholic ACCOUNT OF flesh feasting familiar nEIGHbors, NOT MR ROGERS, turns fiendish..FAMILAR SIXTIES, black and white GRAYaccount;as your formeveryday familar turnS freakISH,nevillle the strong silent everyMANsilent type majority wakes up FAMILARly too hung overto cope. imagineyourTOPSY TURVY grainy,VERY matter of fact grimness... ONCE FAMILIAR THE omnipresent narator told in the third person present glorificationUNRAVELS.AND blows apart this readers preconcieved ZOMBIE IN COLOR[DAWN OF THE DEAD] MALL THE EIGHTIES...notions
Rating:
Summary: Great vampire story
Review: The story I Am Legend is a very well-written vampire story with a nice twist. It's not the usual vampire hunter type book, but ends up making you look at things from two different points of view. It's amazing that the author can keep the reader interested and captivated in the story of one single man. As an avid reader of Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz, I was apprehensive at first about this novel, but ended up being very satisfied. The other stories in the book are hit or miss, some better than others. He does have an interesting writing style and interesting ideas. Some of his short stories were a little on the windy side, but all in all he's a rare mind. Definitely worth picking up and reading the whole thing though, especially I Am Legend.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Good Book That Mirrors Real Life Southern California
Review: I liked this ground breaking vampire novel. I also liked the artwork on this latest edition. But I just wanted the novel by itself! The other stories are good but I hated them being in the book! This should not be a short story collection. I am nit picking but I didn't want that stuff in this book. It's weird to think of the characters in this book living in 1950's Los Angeles County. They even name actual streets that still exist! Like in places like Compton and Inglewood. Which are really bad gangland areas. They have some nice areas there, yes, but they are pretty ghetto these days. Hard to believe they were once nice suburbs. Before the REAL vampires and bloodsuckers moved in. The gangs. And what does one of those gangs called themselves? The Bloods! Ha! Unreal. Matheson was right that violent hordes of bloodthirsty monsters were invading the suburbs of the once beautiful Los Angeles County. More than he realized. Is the book an allegory for what happened to this once decent area? Are the vampires symbols for the invading hordes of lowlife thugs and degenerates who were invading and destroying a good place? And all the law abiding, good citizens of the area fled or came to violent ends? Food for thought to be sure! Or it could just be a decent vampire story. Read the book, enjoy it, and maybe take a drive through the L.A. neighborhoods mentioned in the book. But stay out at night. That's when the vampires come out.
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