Oh, the Horror Of It All

The release of the motion picture reminded me how totally creeped out I was when I first read Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" (Orb, 317 pages, $14.95) as a youngster, so I decided to see if it still holds the same horror today. It does. It surely does.

It is difficult not to be familiar with the rather simple story, since most of the greatest writers of dark fantasy, including Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Robert Bloch, have lavishly extolled its virtues, and there has been a plethora of advertisements and commercials for the Will Smith movie.

A terrible plague has struck mankind, turning the entire population into zombies. All except Robert Neville, who inexplicably has been spared, if that is the correct term. As the last man on Earth, he is different from everyone else, a kind of nonconformist, attacked by zombies who try to seduce him to become one of them when they can't physically get to him.

Written during the Eisenhower years, the novella is often held up as a metaphor for the time, which seemed bland and conformist when contrasted with the Roaring '20s, the Great Depression, and the World War II years.

"I Am Legend" lives on because there is in our culture a persistent, perhaps regrettable, certainly unfathomable, affection for vampire tales — often described as vampires, the creatures who inhabit this dystopian world are actually zombies, though it pretty much comes to the same thing when it's your blood they want — and also because it is one of the best and most stylish of the innumerable novels and stories devoted to that literary and cinematic genre.

Here is Mr. Matheson's description of the nightmare we hope we never have, but which is a nightly occurrence for Neville:

He lay there on the bed and took deep breaths of the darkness, hoping for sleep. But the silence didn't really help. He could still see them out there, the whitefaced men prowling around his house, looking ceaselessly for a way to get in at him. Some of them, probably, crouching on their haunches like dogs, eyes glittering at the house, teeth slowly grating together; back and forth, back and forth.

In the best and most cheerful tradition of noir fiction, "I Am Legend" does not offer a happy ending. It does not offer an ending at all, come to think of it, since the dead return to life — of a sort. This is a story that will live longer even than the blood-sucking immortals who inhabit it.

* * *

By now, every reader of crime and horror fiction knows that Joe Hill is the son of Stephen and Tabitha King, who have been known to write some pretty weird stuff themselves. When he was 19 (he's now 35), his mom told me to watch for him because he was the most talented writer in the family. Even allowing for motherly hyperbole, that was a pretty bold statement.

Young Mr. Hill made the decision to use a pseudonym so that whatever came his way would be earned, not a credit to his dad, one of the world's most beloved authors. That is a courageous decision to make when choosing the writer's life, which is as solitary as that of an oyster.

It turns out that talent was enough. His first book, a short story collection, was published only in Great Britain and won the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Bram Stoker Award for best collection. Copies of the limited edition already sell for a couple of thousand dollars in the collectors' market. Now published in America, "20th Century Ghosts" (Morrow, 316 pages, $24.95) has been selling briskly, with deservedly bright reviews that should warm the chilliest heart.

With a mind as twisted as Mr. Hill's, his parents should be as anxious as the readers of his books.

Among his most memorable characters are children, including one boy fascinated by a museum of more than 100 jars containing people's last breaths; another boy who is lonely, perhaps understandably, since he is an inflatable doll, and still another, kidnapped by a fat man and locked in a basement with a dead phone that rings with a call from a boy who had been murdered a year earlier.

The future looks bright for this author, who may soon justifiably claim to be King of the Hill.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual "Best American Mystery Stories." He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.