Also known as the day I realized that I AM ABSOLUTELY SPINELESS.
I Am Legend; Richard Matheson
I Am Legend is a short piece of clockwork terror. The protagonist, Robert Neville, is the last man on earth (or so it says on the back cover). And he is not having a good time of it. Neville is frustrated, crippled, and devastated by wild swings of mood and desperation; he is also our only guide into a terrifying apocalypse. Neville is neither reliable nor very sympathetic, but he is very effective and his foibles are very refreshing.
I Am Legend has none of the hallmarks of a classic horror story. There is no main hero, and there are no real solutions. Neville survives out of doggedness and tenacity but he is essentially a brute with no pretenses of sophistication. The other paltry characters are buffeted about by the whims of the plot. There are no real explanations. Patches of science and a few meager memories dart through the narrative, but more often than not, they're quick glimpses yielding little illumination. When they do appear, they're frequently clouded by frustration and terror. And finally, the terror is a different breed. Slow, strangling, and unrelenting, the tension builds, existential and unabated, through the end of the novel; there are few staccatos of action or gore.
There are a few faults: I suspect that my biology professor has donned a sack cloth and is now bombed out on Listerine, and Matheson's writing belies a sort of nervous, undisciplined energy, punctuated by descents into unrepentant pulp. However, in short, I Am Legend, is a strangely poetic and gimlet-eyed look into a real world with real people plagued by an ancient superstition. A final round of applause for its ending, which is very grim and completely (tragically) inevitable.
No Country for Old Men (2007). Locates your heartstrings with surgical precision, and takes its wicked, wicked time snipping them one by one. No Country is very, very quiet, very, very methodical, and very, very dangerous. It breathes with a terrifying, unstoppable confidence, and thrums with unhurried tension, unbridled by histrionics and glitz.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to buy myself a pacemaker off of eBay.
