People often debate whether Richard Matheson’s excellent debut, I Am Legend is horror or sci-fi. When it’s that damned good, who cares what label it’s given?
Today we’re going to look at the open pages to see how he establishes our protagonist, Robert Neville and the threat of the vampire-like creatures(and something else…?)
Here’s our opening line:
On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.
The use of the pronoun ‘they’ here instead of naming the threat does so much work for Matheson here. In the first sentence he has a great hook – the reader wants to know who ‘they’ are.
If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn’t work. That was why he chose to stay near the house on those days.
Next, we get the subtle hint that life now, for Neville, is different to how it was before with what he was still used to doing. Writers can learn a lot from Matheson here. Don’t tell us the situation we’re in right away, show us the life the protagonist is living now, hint at the way that it is different to what we expect. Intrigue your reader and make them wonder about what’s going on.
He walked around the house in the dull gray of afternoon, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, trailing threadlike smoke over his shoulder. He checked each window to see if any of the boards had been loosened. After violent attacks, the planks were often split or partially pried off, and he had to replace them completely; a job he hated. Today only one plank was loose. Isn’t that amazing? he thought.
Intrigue is building here about the world he’s living in. We discover that he has to go through a routine of checking and repairing his property. Again, here, Matheson continues his world building by giving Neville day-to-day activities. It shows us that he’s been living this way for some time. The story world hasn’t just come to life on the day Matheson introduces us to Neville – he’s been existing in this for some time. It’s another way that Matheson grounds us in this world. We feel more comfortable here with him, because he knows what he’s doing. As this section continues we get more seemingly normal things which Neville checks, until we get our first indication of vampires:
As he pushed open the front door, he looked at the distorted reflection of himself in the cracked mirror he’d fastened to the door a month ago. In a few days, jagged pieces of the silver-backed glass would start to fall off. Let ’em fall, he thought. It was the last damned mirror he’d put there; it wasn’t worth it. He’d put garlic there instead. Garlic always worked.
If you know this is a story involving vampires, we know Neville is putting these things here to protect himself. The mirror though, is ineffective, so perhaps the vampires of myth aren’t the same as the creatures he faces.
We get a few paragraphs of Neville carrying out his repairs. It’s a very normal activity in what is clearly not a normal situation.
For a while he stood on the front lawn looking up and down the silent length of Cimarron Street. He was a tall man, thirty-six, born of English-German stock, his features undistinguished except for the long, determined mouth and the bright blue of his eyes, which moved now over the charred ruins of the houses on each side of his. He’d burned them down to prevent them from jumping on his roof from the adjacent ones.
The ‘charred ruins’ of the house next door represent the devastation and destruction of this world. The best way to protect himself is to destroy the things around him. It shows us what this world is like, and increases the level of threat from the creatures, still referred to only as ‘them’.
Later he forced himself into the kitchen to grind up the five-day accumulation of garbage in the sink. He knew he should burn up the paper plates and utensils too, and dust the furniture and wash out the sinks and the bathtub and toilet, and change the sheets and pillowcase on his bed; but he didn’t feel like it.
For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him.
While we may have already suspected Neville was by himself, the line above confirms not only this fact, but that it is a permanent situation. We don’t yet know that he believes himself to be truly lone as a man in the world, but the idea is suggested by us.
In the next section we get a lengthy description of the process of harvesting and preparing his garlic – more routine. Once we get to what its purpose is, we understand more about his adversary and how they act:
In the beginning he had hung these necklaces over the windows. But from a distance they’d thrown rocks until he’d been forced to cover the broken panes with plywood scraps. Finally one day he’d torn off the plywood and nailed up even rows of planks instead. It had made the house a gloomy sepulcher, but it was better than having rocks come flying into his rooms in a shower of splintered glass. And, once he had installed the three air-conditioning units, it wasn’t too bad. A man could get used to anything if he had to.
The menace is developed further. They act as a group and they have some intelligence. We’re learning more about what Neville is up against.
His routine continues:
When he was finished stringing the garlic cloves, he went outside and nailed them over the window boarding, taking down the old strings, which had lost most of their potent smell.
He had to go through this process twice a week. Until he found something better, it was his first line of defense.
Defense? he often thought. For what?
Matheson starts to let us into Neville’s thoughts. Only after establishing the routine do we understand that Neville finds it largely futile. The fact that he does persist helps develop his character and endears him to us as readers. We’re going to want to know what drives him to continue in this frustrating world.
After the garlic, Matheson moves Neville on to preparing stakes, still continuing with the presentation of these activities as something of a chore. It readers hadn’t picking up that these creatures were like vampires from the garlic, the stakes are sure to lead to the connection being made.
All afternoon he made stakes.
He lathed them out of thick doweling, band-sawed into nineinch lengths. These he held against the whirling emery stone until they were as sharp as daggers.
It was tiresome, monotonous work, and it filled the air with hotsmelling wood dust that settled in his pores and got into his lungs and made him cough.
Yet he never seemed to get ahead. No matter how many stakes he made, they were gone in no time at all. Doweling was getting harder to find, too. Eventually he’d have to lathe down rectangular lengths of wood. Won’t that be fun? he thought irritably.
Again, we’re let inside his head and we see more of his frustrations. Also, we’re not told how the stakes are used. This is left entirely to the reader’s imagination. Obviously those familiar with vampire lore will understand their purpose, and no doubt Matheson was counting on his readers understanding this. What we do get is the idea of this being a hoard of vampire-like creatures, there are so many, he can barely create enough stakes dealing with them all. Combine the mass of killing he must be doing with his attitude and we get a really interesting character. He’s not painted as a hero, valiantly fighting off the undead; he’s just a man doing what he has to do to survive, and for me that’s infinitely more engaging.
The section finishes with this line:
In another hour they’d be at the house again, the filthy bastards. As soon as the light was gone.
We’re back with this idea of the creatures coming out at night, and for the first time they’re identified with something other than a pronoun. We’re still not told what they are, but ’filthy bastards’ certainly lets us know how Neville feels about them.
All in all, it’s an incredibly effective opening to the novel. It does a great job of showing us Neville’s day-to-day life, developing his character and the world in which he exists. We get enough details about the threat he lives with to understand his troubles, but not so much that we can see how all of this is going to play out.
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While I’m talking about I Am Legend, I have to add I’d love to play a strategy game that was based upon this opening, were you have to secure your property, carry out repairs, gather supplies, slowing building a safer environment. Does anything like that exist?