The vampires cannot get in, thanks to the garlic he's strung from all the windows, but they can taunt him, at length, daring him to come out, and (in the case of the women) tempting him with their carnal charms.

Bitter, alcoholic, mourning the deaths of his wife and daughter, unable to explain just why he persists in living, Neville gets what satisfaction he can by stalking and staking the dormant vampires in daylight. Along the way he also conducts his own investigation into the cause of the plague, managing to isolate the bacterium that has spread the contagion through mosquito bites.

Even so, the loneliness remains the worst of his torments. But the nightmare of his daily life has turned him into something that might not be fit to live with. When he captures a young woman named Ruth, who may or may not carry the contagion herself, there is no joyous Adam/Eve epiphany. At least at first, Ruth quite rightly sees him as brutal and crazy, as bad in his own way as the savage creatures who call out to him at night.

As it happens, he decides to trust her. But maybe he shouldn't. She is hiding a secret from him ... one that goes to the heart of just what constitutes a monster in the first place.

The legend that will not die

I Am Legend has been filmed twice, once as The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price, and once, with considerably less fidelity to the source novel, as The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston. It has also been the basis of several other attempted adaptations, including an abortive attempt by Ridley Scott to use it as the basis of a big-budget Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. More recent rumors cast Will Smith and Johnny Depp as the headliners for yet another version, slated for 2007. Of course, none of this has anything to do with the relentless power of the original book, but it's worth mentioning its screen history so we can then note that the shadow it casts is even longer than that. You can see its footprints in George Romero's zombie universe, for instance, as well as any other recent program pitting lone surviving humans against a humanity turned implacably monstrous.

The novel, startlingly slim by today's standards, contains some elements that have not aged well. Among them is a brief conversation, implying a past nuclear exchange between the United States and an unknown foreign enemy. There's another dismaying, wholly throwaway reference to "giant grasshoppers" that have been discovered in Colorado. Back in 1954, the young Matheson, not yet fully in control of his gifts, may have believed he needed these elements in order to justify his vampire plague, but both are dropped the very moment they're mentioned, and, once read, completely fade from our memories of a book that otherwise continues to resonate in our shared culture, 50 years after publication.

The key is the unforgettable character of Neville: a shattered figure capable of finding dark humor in his plight, whose unimaginable loneliness amid daily horror has long since deformed him into something almost as monstrous as the creatures he is driven to defy. The very title reflects his discovery that to vampires he's an infamous icon of fear, more Dracula than the Van Helsing he wryly imagines himself to be. He is not unaware of the ironies. At one point, driven philosophical by drink, he even engages in an extended inner monologue that concludes vampires are no more vile than bad parents, munitions manufactures and—in a line that must have been fun for the young Matheson to write—publishers. In the end, forced to recognize himself as the figure of fear he has become, Neville comes full circle, recognizing that with vampires defining normalcy, he has become the bogeyman who haunts the scary stories told to children. He is legend.