Center for Teaching & Learning

When ravaging vampires lurk around your house at night throwing rocks at it, and you don’t know if you will live to see the light of morning, you consider your options: survive or die. Robert Neville is supposedly the last man on earth as the vampire onslaught continues. He finds there is nothing much left to do in the world, so he decides to preform experiments to determine why this disease is here. The first thing he finds out: he is immune.
Author Richard Matheson has created an apocalyptic world where few people survive a disease-ridden planet. This book is about one person named Robert Neville, a curious middle-aged man who wants to know why he is chosen to be the last. As dust storms blow viciously across the world, spreading what he thinks is the reason for the disease, Robert wants to know why it is happening. First, he realizes he is immune when he is bitten, clawed, or chewed he does not turn. When the disease first starts, family and friends all around him drop like flies and die or transform into vampires.
I enjoyed this book because I never knew what was going to happen next. At some points I wondered how this could continue on but Matheson picks right up on an engaging plot twist.
The narrative voice is from the third person point-of-view of Robert Neville, which is a cool way to write when there is only one character that the book follows. I didn’t like certain parts of the book where Robert Neville embarks on retrieving food from the “Oh so convenient grocery store down the block,” which I thought was an unrealistic feature because it makes it almost too easy for him to survive with all the food he needs. He also goes into the houses of neighbors and very descriptively murders the sleeping vampires that were hiding from the sun, which also makes it easy to survive the night and gain vengeance during the day.
There is a movie based on the book that is similar in that there are few people alive, but in the movie Robert Neville has a huge lab, test rats, and conducts different experiments that don’t seem realistic. In the book, Robert hangs garlic from his windows and creates wooden crosses which he nails to his house to prevent the vampires from entering his hideout. This novel placed me right in the reading zone, and I thought it would be great to have a second book in the series to know what happened after Robert Neville. I recommend this book to any person who likes apocalyptic themed books and loves captivating stories.
Kaleb
Tom Doherty Associates, 294 pages