I Am Legend by Richard Matheson – review

 

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Is I Am Legend a horror story? Science fiction? Both?

The protagonist, Robert Neville, is a solitary figure, the last man alive on Earth. But he is not entirely alone; he is tormented by what others have become. The classic monster of myth and horror stories – vampires. Human shaped but without humanity.

They come to his home at night, a home that he has turned into a fortress against them. They taunt and tease him in any way they can in their desire for his blood. The female vampires even exploiting his sexual frustrations and loneliness – playing out erotic displays on the lawn – to try and draw him out. 

By day, Robert can roam as far as he can during daylight hours. But, at coming night, he must return to shelter, or meet violent death. 

So then, a horror novel? One man against vampires thirsty for his blood?

There are moments of horror and suspense. As when Robert realises, out on errands during the day, that his watch has stopped and he has stayed out later than he ought. A race with monsters at his heels follows. However, this book is not as simple as all that.

In Matheson's book, the vampire is not a creature of myths and folklore, some gothic creation of the supernatural. It is the language of science that is used to explain the origins and traits of the vampire here. Bacteria and psychology, not evil and the unexplained. If certain of these phenomena did not fit in with the bacilli, he felt inclined to judge their cause as superstition.

 Matheson brought horror and sci-fi together here, producing something hybrid perhaps, or something else entirely.

With his main character apparently a sole human survivor of apocalyptic catastrophe, this novel is Matheson's deep exploration of loneliness and loss. Neville had not always been alone, his family lost to the contagion and to death. And this is not a story of his struggle against demons at his door, but the demons in himself.

It is the story of a lonely man trying to hold himself together, trying to find reason in a brutal world. Striving to stay human in more ways than one.

Sometimes, in the long and lonely evenings and nights, Robert has found relief in too much whisky. Letting a veil of inebriation soften the hard edges of the cruel world outside his door. And the reader is witness to the conscious efforts that this character makes to abstain. How easy, he considers, it might be to give in and slide into oblivion. 

But one form of oblivion can lead to another, a much more permanent oblivion, and our protagonist isn't ready for that yet.

As with the best horror and science fiction stories, this novel uses the fantastic as the framework for a very human story, and ask human questions. What is the point of carrying on in the face of the unimaginable? What else is lost when one loses human connection? And what can a person abandon, and what must they hold on to, before they lose their humanity?

It is the loneliness that is the real horror in this story. It exacerbates every other torture that Robert endures, and leads to self-torture too. Robert's isolation, depression, and desperate want for escape is the horror, not the vampires outside.

After the last page has turned and the book is closed, it is not the pathetic vampires which stayed in my mind, but the image of a solitary man doing what he can to stave off despair. Sometimes sadly over too many glasses of whisky. And sometimes throwing himself into studies of his enemies. Vacillating between despair and hope. 

This is a slow study of loneliness and depression looking for hope.

So, horror? Science-fiction? 

I Am Legend is a bit of both, but really it's neither.

What it has definitely become is influential. Published in 1954, it has been an influence on many post-apocalyptic stories that followed, with its tale of humanity wiped out by contagion and infected survivors becoming something monstrous. These sorts of stories are much more commonplace than they were before Matheson's novel, and many of them owe a debt to Legend.

George A. Romero and Stephen King, amongst others, have acknowledged Matheson and this novel as a major influence.

By the way, there is another monster in this novel. A monster that hides in plain sight, but which is not seen because of our point of view. A creature not of the world in which the novel is set. 

It is the presence of this monster, revealed in the final pages, which might really rock the reader. That might leave the reader considering just how much the world, and a way of life, can change.

To sum up, a novel that uses horror to get at what's human. To consider the fragility of life.

You can purchase a copy of I Am Legend by Richard Matheson here.

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Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson – review

 

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For the last couple of weeks I have been confined to bed with Covid-19. I haven't been anywhere, except in and out of sleep, coughing fits, and up and down in temperature. So, getting lost in Will Ferguson's travelogue, and "delving into Canada's history and landscape", offered some escape from my captivity. If only in my mind.

In Beauty Tips From Moosejaw, Ferguson details his criss-crossing journeys through Canada over the years, and describes the nation's landscape, its people, and past. And, in doing so, draws the reader closer to the essence of the country, its beating heart. 

Will Ferguson is a Canadian novelist and travel writer and, if you have read this blog before, you might remember that I reviewed another of his books, Hokkaido Highway Blues, here.

As with that other travelogue, the author imbues this work with something of the personal. However, the author's individual reflections and family history inform this book with less cynicism than Highway Blues. This time we find Ferguson a more positive man, with a wife and young children joining him on his travels. The reader here gets the sense that Ferguson found some reconnection with the land of his birth, and has found reasons to be optimistic since the journey detailed in that other book.

Near the beginning of Beauty Tips . . . , the author tells us of some of the ennui he felt for where he grew up – something many young people the world over will recognise. He even describes boredom with the Aurora borealis! But, towards the end, Ferguson is writing appreciatively about the country, waxing poetic, and how what and who went before informs the land today.

Just as Ferguson's book on his hitchhiking trip across Japan also details a journey of self-discovery, so too does this book. In one, the writer discovers that the journey had to be taken as a step towards leaving, in the other it is perhaps a step towards rediscovery and reclamation. 

I very much enjoyed the way this book moved seamlessly from past to present. Taking the reader to the earliest days of Canada's history, permeating the locales he describes with the lives that built and defined them, and back to the modern day. Tracing the delicate threads of a web.

The author describes history's reach through decades and centuries, and its ghostly presence in the here and now.

The author's use of these historical events is worked wonderfully into the book, and the reader's experience of the book is richer for its inclusion.

Reading Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw, the author's affection for his subject is clear. Introducing the reader to a country to which he is bound by history and the blood in his veins. Familial ties that stretch into the long past, a small part of the history he describes, and into the future through his children. He may mock it for its foibles or throw a light on its failures, as well as celebrate its beauty, but one feels that that is done with fondness too. A hope that it can be better.

Like any good piece of travel writing, this book inspires curiosity and wonder. If travel broadens the mind, so too does a good travel book. Yes, this is a book that inspires itchy feet in its reader!

You can purchase a copy of Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw here.

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My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite – review

 

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This is a novel that holds humour within its pages, but not much hope. Here, superficiality and violence rule.

Sisters Korede and Ayoola are quite different. The elder sister, Korede, is a nurse, organised and ambitious, and hoping to find love with Tade, a doctor at the hospital where she works. Ayoola is young and beautiful, a clothing designer with an impressive Instagram following, but no discernibly profound feelings. Not much beyond meeting her own needs and desires. Oh, and her boyfriends keep meeting violent ends.

Ayoola insists that the deaths her romantic partners suffer are the results of self defence and misfortune. But when the number of fatalities connected to her sister continues to grow it becomes more difficult for Korede to believe this. And then, there is Ayoola's lack of emotions . . .

With a character like Ayoola at its core, a character concerned mostly with violence and surface stuff, the novel can easily take on themes of abuse that happens between men and women – in both directions – and the social-media-material-world of today. And, appropriately, these themes are explored with a knife sharp wit.

Through Korede's eyes, we see the aftermath of her younger sister's bloody violence, and then we watch Ayoola coolly exploit her victims' deaths for likes on Instagram. A naughty little comment on performative compassion, and the gap that exists between people behind screens and what they display in their feed.

For a long time, women in crime novels and thrillers have too often been little more than the pretty victim. Throughout fiction, female characters haven't moved much beyond the role of 'damsel in distress' – frankly, it speaks to quite a lack of imagination in some writers!

So, a novel with two women at the centre, two sisters, with the men as supporting characters, is refreshing. It's something new and exciting. 

There are no damsels in distress here, but there are no heroes either. Yes, it's a novel without much hope, but it is a wickedly witty and fun read.

You can purchase a copy of My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite here.

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