Baby Got Books

I Am Legendarily Not Very Good

Here’s a lesson I learned at the poker table: don’t believe the other players. I know, I know — this is a fundamental theorem of playing poker. But despite how much I thought I knew about this practice, I unfortunately believed it when a few folks at my last poker game told me that I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, was a groundbreaking horror novel and a great book. So I bought it. Despite “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FEATURING WILL SMITH” plastered across the paperback cover.

SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK, STOP READING THIS POST.

Matheson isn’t a bad writer. He’s got a pretty easy-to-read style. His two major faults, in my humble opinion, are (i) a tendency to beat a metaphor into the ground, and (ii) his inability to bring a story to a rewarding conclusion.

As to (i), in this book, Matheson has a tendency to fixate on something — whether it be a “palsy”-type feeling (he uses the term at least three times over page and a half), or a feeling of “razors” or “fire” or “stabbing” or “nails” on the main character’s chest — he drives it into the ground.

As for (ii), I guess I was mislead by the trailers for the Will Smith movie. Did you see them? Did they indicate that the entire freaking story was about vampires? I didn’t think so. Had I known that’s what this book was about, I might not have endeavored to read it. It wasn’t until after I finished and checked with my friend Wikipedia that I learned that the movie deviates significantly from the book. As did “The Omega Man”, which was also apparently an adaptation of this book. Minus, of course, the vampires. Anyway, as to the spoiler, the main character is persecuted by vampires and almost-vampires following a plague that turns people into . . . you guessed it . . . vampires, and when captured, takes suicide pills given to him by a sympathetic captor who he had previously “captured”. The end. He is legend, because he’s the “abnormal” one, since everyone else who’s still alive is half-vampire. That’s not a great description, but hey — it’s not a great story.

When I finished, I kept reading, not realizing that the paperback I had bought featured several stories by Matheson. I kept reading, wondering how the next chapter connected with the last. After a couple of pages, I came to the realization that the man in the black suit at the carnival was part of a new story. That’s how abruptly the story ended. I couldn’t believe it. It reminded me of the 1958 movie “The Blob”. When the people freeze the Blob, they don’t know what to do with it, since freezing it seems to be the only thing that can contain it. Cut to a scene of a plane dropping a huge package in Antarctica, with “The End” (and then a question mark) on the screen. Talk about cutting to the chase and wrapping things up a little too quickly, even for Mr. Short Attention Span over here. Aaaargghhh. I’m annoyed.

Books, Fiction, Review | Shaft | January 7, 2008 12:51 pm

3 Comments

By Shortbus, January 7, 2008 @ 11:04 pm

Um, can I admit that I just finished a very fun vampire story? Maybe knowing that vampires are involved ahead of time makes a difference. Tell Mrs. Shaft to pick up a copy of Twilight by Stephanie Meyers. Good, high school vampire romance can’t be beat.
By Shaft, January 8, 2008 @ 8:55 am

I think she might have read that one already — I’ll check with her.

And hey — I’ve got nothing against vampires per se; I just didn’t realize that they were the focal point of this book.
By Shaft, January 8, 2008 @ 11:32 am

Hey — It just dawned on me that two of the most disappointing books I’ve read in the last year or so were turned into movies starring Will Smith. “I Am Legend”, and “Independence Day”. Granted, that “Independence Day” movie wasn’t based on the dreadful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Ford of the same name, but it’s still kind of a coincidence.