I Am Legend

There was no sound but that of his shoes and the now senseless singing of birds. Once I thought they sang because everything was right with the world, Robert Neville thought, I know now I was wrong. They sing because they’re feeble-minded.

This is a straight up vampire novel; the Will Smith movie shares the title and a few plot points, but its set in NYC whereas the book is set in LA. I also watched The Omega Man and Charleton Heston makes a better Robert Neville, the protagonist, an angry, disturbed, semi-alcoholic white man, apparently the only non vampire, living in his house cum fortress (where all the windows have been festooned with garlic). Neville comes by his disturbance justifiably as he lost his wife and daughter to the plague then, its implied, that the wife came back as a vampire forcing him to put her down.

At the beginning of the book, like 2-years (?) after the vampocalypse, (1976) Neville just drives around during the day either looking for supplies to loot or killing the day-sleeping vampires. We get some flashbacks to an apocalypse of some sort, I assume, a nuclear war (which somehow did not directly affect the US won since LA is still standing) since there are now dust storms. At night he hides from the vampires, in particular, his pre-apocalypse next door neighbor and commuting buddy, now vampire, Ben Cortman, who can still talk, saying such things as “Come out Neville!”. And that raises the issue that there are two types of vampire, those that are intelligent and those that are more like vampire zombies: solely focused on prey.