I loved it; gripping, heart warming, shameful, despairing, brilliant and quite beautiful.
I'd seen the film some years ago and knew it was based on the book but had heard it diverged from the book a lot in the end. But wow, the book was a different beast.
The story centres around Robert Neville, the last man alive in a world of vampires and undead.
He's surviving, but for what he doesn't know. The story doesn't hold back to expose his awful constant sexual frustration and how, somehow, rape is normalised to him.
His survival is bleak and he knows it. He's constantly asking why he continues and fights for his sanity whilst every single night he barricades himself in his home whilst the undead come calling at his door.
Brilliantly written, brilliant story and I only wish it was longer.
When I read the last line of the book, I broke into a smile. Such a good story that holds up so well after being written in 1954.
6 Highlight(s)
Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?
I'm not going to rape the woman! Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood? He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.
Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?
In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.
Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope.
I am legend.