But it makes me wonder if Neville had this tendency before the plague infected everyone. I can plausibly see how someone would react to possibly being the only human left on the earth by drinking lots and lots of booze. He drinks, then dramatically stumbles about cursing the vampires, his life, gets mad, inevitably smashes something or cuts himself, then goes to bed. Not an atypical reaction given the situation, but he doesn’t just drink. He drinks himself into a stupor several times, to avoid thinking about his situation. But I think for modern readers it just doesn’t translate as well. I suppose Neville is more the example than the cliche, considering how old this story is. But I feel like Neville’s alcohol dependency and his reactions to the female vampires are just overly cliche.
I guess you would have to be, to make sure you can survive the nightly onslaught of the perpetually annoying vampires that throw rocks at your house (no supernatural strength or quickness in these baddies thankfully no sparkles either). He’s extremely meticulous about taking care of his home, his supplies, everything. Maybe in the beginning I felt for him, drudging through his day, going through his daily routine. The concept and theme of the story really hit deep (I’ll get into those in a minute). I respect it as a classic in its genre, one of the staples that fueled countless other stories and added to the wealth of vampire lore. Now, older and maybe wiser, I find on my second read that I still don’t care for it. I vaguely remember not really caring for this story when I first read it, thinking it wasn’t romantic enough for my tastes at the time. I previously read this story back in my ultra Goth days when I devoured anything and everything vampire. This story is a classic vampire tale, originally published in 1954, that tells the story of Robert Neville, who may or may not be the last human on earth. And so will spoilers, just so you know! So let’s begin with a super classic: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. I’m sure plenty of ranting on both wonderful and terrible things will still occur.
Dishing on horror isn’t really new to this blog (see my rant on creepy mannequins), but I’ll be getting a little more in depth with some of these stories. Hi gang! This is the first of a series of horror-related posts I’ll be doing for my Reading In Genre: Horror Monsters course for Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction.
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