I Am Legend

For some really strange reason, when they started advertising the movie, I was all about it. I watched all the trailers, I talked to my students about it, and I tried to find friends to go see it with me. No one wanted to.

What's not to like about a zombie apocalypse movie starring Will Smith, a German Shepherd, and lots of badly-designed CG monsters? Not to mention all those weird mannequins.

When I was a child, I happened across the old version of the story, which was called The Last Man on Earth and starred Vincent Price. Of course. It scared my socks off—but not any more than the Will Smith version scared me when I finally did watch the dvd with the siblings, several months after all the hype was gone. I was lying on the floor in the dark, trembling. Gingey can call me a pansy all she likes, but that doesn't change much, I guess.

I think it's because, almost like my annual cravings for hot dogs, sometimes I have an uncharacteristic desire to be frightened, but only in a way of my own choosing. There's a big difference between the tension you feel when Will Smith is driving around singing Bob Marley to his dog and the tension you feel when Vincent Price is wandering around plunging stakes into the undead.

And what brought all this on? The book. I went to a friend's house last weekend and we spent the better part of the day watching episodes of The Twilight Zone. He was convinced that I would love it, and he wasn't far wrong. In one of the stories, a man passed a display rack of the 1950s version of the story—re-titled, apparently, to the Vincent version. Before I judge, I should probably make sure that wasn't the original title, but it appears to me that the original title is actually I Am Legend. After all, it is the last line of the book.

I got ahold of the book last night and decided to read it. For variety. Too many princess books is bad for the intellect, and everything else on my immediate reading list is massively long. That, and I'm sort of on a sci-fi kick right now. We read A Wrinkle in Time for my book club, and I recently watched In Time (an okay movie if you can get past Amanda Seyfried's fringe ... well, actually, I liked it a lot. Not in a "that's such a mind-blowing concept and a great movie!" way, but an "it was mildly interesting and even a little bit sweet, and I guess Justin Timberlake isn't so bad" way).

The book, though, was rather a surprise. It wasn't anything like the Will Smith version, which makes Robert Neville much more noble and ends much more happily. Must be the difference between 1950s and turn-of-the-century media. We tend to like happy endings more these days. Aside from the depressing ending, however, it was a really great book. It's hard to describe the style, but it was somewhat like these more modern writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Norman Maclean. A lot of it reminded me of The Road. The movement by movement detail created a beautiful tension, rather than boredom. It referenced Shakespeare, great Classical music, and other great stuff. I especially liked the parts where he made fun of Dracula (a really dumb book).

I could quote a lot of impressive passages, but I will leave with one of my favorites: "Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?"