To be honest, I was a bit disappointed by I Am Legend. (I realize I'm in the minority here.) I'm not sure if it's because I've read a ton of other books that I've loved recently and this book just wasn't as good, or if it just wasn't my kind of thing. I can put a finger on what I didn't like about it, though.
I'm not picky about point of view most of the time, but I really thought the POV in this story was distancing. We don't get too many of the main character's thoughts, and for the first couple of chapters, he's referred to as either "he" or his full name, "Robert Neville." The full name thing gave me the impression that this book was very formal. However, most of the tension here has to come from the internal conflict - the loneliness, the fear, the frustration, the boredom. And that doesn't come across so strongly in third person, in my opinion. Are the vampires scary? Yes, but they are stuck outside until he accidentally forgets to wind his watch and leaves the garage open. And a monster that can't even break in a window because of a string of garlic isn't all that intimidating. If he wasn't alone, if he had company (especially female company), I'm willing to bet he could ignore the cat calls every now and then. So again, it all comes down to the internal stuff, and I wanted more of it. I wanted to be closer to it, and that was the job of the POV. That isn't to say I didn't see how pained Robert Neville was, but I didn't feel the impact as strongly as I would have had it been first person. Had Robert Neville been directly showing me how he felt by letting me straight into his head.
Having that distance kept me from really becoming absorbed in the text. And without that absorption, I kept stumbling upon author mistakes. For example, in chapter one he falls asleep with earplugs in, earplugs good enough to block out the noise of a hoard of vampires calling his name and throwing rocks at his house. Chapter two opens with his alarm waking him up the next morning. But the earplugs are in still, that's not something you normally take out in your sleep. So how does he hear the alarm? That's a nitpicky thing that I'm sure many readers could clarify (maybe the earplugs fell out in the night?), but the fact that I caught that really tells me how unabsorbed I was in this story. Ordinarily, when I love a book, I'll read it in a day and won't even notice if the author changed the main character's name halfway through. With I Am Legend, I found myself struggling from chapter two until chapter six.
However, I will say that once I made it past part 1, there were moments I did enjoy. The heart wrenching parts where he relives the last days of his family really reached me. Finally the emotional/internal side I was looking for! Perhaps I liked this section more because he's interacting with people, too, just as I like the section where he's winning over the dog. It gives him another living thing to interact with, and the way he lures the dog in with burgers in garlic rings is kind of endearing, if only because he's trying to make sure the dog gets the food, not the vampires. Toward the end, I enjoyed how he became the enemy in a way. He goes out to hunt Cortman as a relaxing hobby, which really says something about his place in this new, vampire-ridden world. It was an interesting twist that elevates this over other vampire stories.
My final thoughts: although I couldn't get into this story the way other readers have, I'm very glad it was different from the movie. I was incredibly nervous about reading this it all because the movie was such a "Hollywood makeover" of an apocalyptic world. On screen, I didn't know that there were vampires. I had no idea what the other people had become. At least in the book I had some sense of what was going on, some deeper understanding of what Neville was up against. And while I would have liked to have been more inside his head, I can appreciate what Richard Mattheson achieved with this story (and mourn what Hollywood destroyed).
