Filed under: Book Reviews, Horror | Tags: book reviews, books, horror, i am legend, literature, richard matheson, vampires
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend belongs on the shelf next to Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Matheson’s book considers the vampire not only as a scourge, but as a sort of new development in evolution, a sudden leap forward for humankind. Matheson asks not just what life is like for the last man on earth, but what life is for those he is fighting against.
The bulk of I Am Legend is about Robert Neville’s daily life: his to-do lists, his efforts to keep up his home, his meals, his “shopping” trips, and his attempts to learn more about vampires – first to learn how to kill them, and then to see if there is any way of curing them of their disease. Vampirism in Matheson’s novel is spread not only by the bite of vampires, but by air. In flashbacks, we see the early days of the plague, when few people had any suspicion that the illness going around was more than a particularly virulent strain of the flu.
One of the real joys in reading I Am Legend is the simplicity of Matheson’s prose, and the way he fits Neville’s attempts to survive into the text as just another part of the day. Early in the novel, removing vampires who have been killed by their fellows – each night they mass outside Neville’s home, sometimes eating one another when no better fare presents itself – is presented as no more notable an activity than gathering other debris from around the house.
He put on heavy gloves and walked over to the woman on the sidewalk.
There was certainly nothing attractive about them in the daylight, he thought, as he dragged them across the lawn and threw them up on the canvas tarpaulin. There wasn’t a drop left in them; both women were the color of fish out of water. He raised the gate and fastened it. He went around the lawn then, picking up stones and bricks and putting them into a cloth sack. He put the sack in the station wagon and then took off his gloves. He went inside the house, washed his hands, and made lunch: two sandwiches, a few cookies, and a thermos of hot coffee.
Neville’s story is told over years, allowing Matheson to fully explore what isolation and waning hope do to a man. I Am Legend is, at end, a story about what makes a person. Neville’s attempts to learn something about the vampires, to in some way help them and in so doing help himself, reveals the depth of his loneliness. When he sees a dog, a fellow survivor, he is caught between joy at the potential for a companion, and some deeper despair that he can’t hope for anything more than a dog.
It’s fascinating, too, to watch Matheson play with traditional ideas of the vampire. When he realizes that it’s vampires, not simply a disease, that he’s up against, Neville’s research pushes him to confront the romanticized images of the vampire in literature, and how those images are both applicable to, and vastly different from, the vampires he faces.
And all without blood-eyed vampires hovering over heroines’ beds. All without bats fluttering against estate windows, all without the supernatural. The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told.
Matheson seamlessly weaves together these two halves of the story: Neville’s attempts to live in “a world in which murder was easier than hope”, and the true story of the vampire. In doing so, he gives us a classic and gorgeously wrought story that faces, in nearly equal measure, the questions of hope, loneliness, and what it means to live – from the view of both vampire and man.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Horror, Literary Fiction | Tags: book reviews, books, colson whitehead, horror, literature, zombies, zone one
Colson Whitehead manages the seemingly impossible in Zone One, injecting the zombie novel with a literary bent. He takes this idea of the undead, the afterlife taken to its most gruesome conclusion, and uses it as a filter to look at a city, to look at the people who survived the apocalypse (or rather, the people who have survived longer than the others have), to look at the reasons for their survival, and to examine what hope means when there seems little reason to hope. What’s more, in doing these things he makes them seem obvious – how did no one think, sooner than this, to do with zombies what Whitehead has done so well in Zone One?
As it opens, the novel is almost a love affair with New York City, with “Mark Spitz” (a nickname, but the only way we know our main character) looking back on visits to his uncle and the ever-changing city. This image of New York, of wreckage followed by new buildings, again and again, are eerily prescient of the later images of the zombies walking the New York streets, apparently capable not only of endless arrival but of endless development. This early image of New York, though, retains a sort of quiet beauty in its vision of endless restructuring:
In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York City. (6)
The world Mark Spitz inhabits, a New York that’s been decimated and cleared of its former inhabitants, a New York that has been divided into zones now being painstakingly cleared of “skels” (the zombies) and “stragglers,” who aren’t quite zombies but exist in some nether world, standing motionless at some post they’ve selected for reasons Spitz and his compatriots will never be able to understand, is one with moments of hope. Though Spitz suspects the world has been left with only the people who were mediocre in their former lives (like him, whose “most appropriate designation” in a high school yearbook “would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named the Most Likely Anything” [10]), and though his life at the moment consists of little but walking through building after building, seeking the stragglers missed by the marines who did the first run-through of Zone One, he also finds some cause to hope for a better world as a result of the crushing defeat of the former system. Brief as these moments may be, Whitehead’s vision of the indominatibility of both human hope and despair is powerful:
There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top on each other? Or was that particular bramble of animosities, fears, and envies impossible to recreate? If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns. (231)
Whitehead occasionally uses this zombie plague as an opportunity to comment on these issues of race and class and the bigotries humans can’t seem to help holding. He’s never heavy-handed with this, though, and the New York Mark Spitz is working in now is at times crushing for the ways it is similar to the previous world, and the ways in which it is different. Though Spitz and the others trying to clear Zone One of skels and stragglers are, on paper, the survivors of the old order, Whitehead suggests, too, that the skels are blindly keeping that old world alive, that in them you can see some true New York story.
The damned bubbled and frothed on the most famous street in the world, the dead things still proudly indicating, despite their grime and wounds and panoply of leaking orifices, the tribes to which they had belonged, in gray pin-striped suits, classic rock T-shirts, cowboy boots, dashikis, striped cashmere cardigans, fringed suede vests, plush joggings suits. What they had died in. All the misery of the world channeled through this concrete canyon, the lament into which the human race was being transformed person by person. Every race, color, and creed was represented in this congregation that funneled down the avenue. As it had been before, per the myth of this melting-pot city. The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention; it took them all in, every immigrant in their strivings, regardless of bloodline, the identity of their homeland, the number of coins in their pocket. Nor did this plague discriminate; your blood fell instantly or your blood held out longer, but your blood always failed in the end. (243)
Zone One is an extraordinary novel, one of those rare concerted mashups of literary and genre fiction that doesn’t cheapen either genre but rather brings both to new heights. Whitehead’s zombies are zombies, literally, but they are also a marker of something else – of the way the things and stories we hope to bury have a way of endlessly renewing themselves.
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Filed under: Horror, short stories, Story Sundays | Tags: edgar allen poe, horror, literature, reading, short stories, story sundays, the tell-tale heart
Story Sundays is a weekly feature at Fat Books & Thin Women. Always short stories, always ones available online for free.
We’re going with a classic this week – that favorite of high school English classes, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe packs a healthy dose of horror into this short story, and it’s not what the narrator does – murdering a man because of his blue eye, describing in matter-of-fact manner how he hides the body – as how he tells us what he does. The narrator through the story makes claims to his sanity, but the very things he views as markers of his sanity reveal his madness to the reader.
And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
Coloring the story is the narrator’s pride at the murder, and his actions in the week that leads up to it. As he writes early in the story, “you should have seen me.” “The Tell-Tale Heart” is probably as good a lesson in writing horror as exists: it’s not what the narrator does in the story, but what he thinks about what he does, that is so awful to the reader.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Brief Reviews, Commercial Fiction, Nonfiction | Tags: anne rice, are you there god, books, elizabeth george, forever, history, horror, interview with the vampire, judy blume, literature, missing joseph, mystery, mystery novel, payment in blood, the worst hard time, timothy egan, what came before he shot her, ya fiction
I don’t know how exactly, because I’ve been putting in some more hours at school and with the family and also watching a lot of Gilmore Girls and handwashing my clothes and baking bread and occasionallky going for a walk, but I’ve been reading a lot lately. I would probably die if I tried to write a blog post about every book I’ve read in the past month or so (and you would die of boredom), but I want to give these books some attention because a few I really liked.
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was awesome. Back in college I was just as skilled a bullshitter as I am today, and in one of my lower periods (my sophomore year) I took some stupid classes, including Witchcraft & Magic. The entire football team (minus its star, Ray Rice) was taking this course, and I spent most of my time doodling on my legal pad, telling the football players to shut up, and sneaking out for bathroom breaks. I also watched a few vampire films for a paper, and I’m pretty sure I spent most of Interview with the Vampire sitting on my friend’s floor clutching a warm can of beer trying to hide my freakout.
I was expecting the book to scare me just as much. When I read this I was in a rough place because the dogs on the farm next door to me started barking, nonstop, once the sun went down, and my mouse became really, really loud. I couldn’t sleep through the night as it was, between the dogs and the mouse clattering his way around the pots and pans in my sink, trying to jump into my trash can, and had already started to convince myself that all these sounds equaled someone breaking into my mouse to murder me, so reading Interview with the Vampire seemed like it might be a bad idea. It turned out not to be; Anne Rice does the slow build thing really well. Honestly, not that much happens in this book – you know, there’s Lestat, and Claudia, and some crazy vampire parties, and some even crazier Eastern European vampire zombies, and after Claudia kills Lestat and then you know that he’s coming back I could barely breathe, but most of the book is about Louis being kind of angsty and figuring out what it means to be a vampire. The reason this book is so good is that Anne Rice’s vampires feel a lot of human emotions, even when they don’t manage to identify them as such.
Interview underscored how truly terrible Twilight is. What is wrong with Stephanie Meyer that she took vampires – who are so freaky and sexual and unforgiving – and turned them into glittery-skinned baseball playing teens living in Oregon and swooning over dull high school girls? Yeesh.
Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time is a book that deserves a whole post – but I’m lazy. For one thing, it’s one of the best books of historical reportage I’ve ever read, and for another it’s probably of particular interest to the sort of people who visit my site because it helps give another side to The Grapes of Wrath-y story of the Dust Bowl. I never thought too much about how Steinbeck’s story doesn’t tell the story of the people who stayed behind, only those who left to try and make a better life in California. Egan’s book is suffocating and at times overwhelming; it is impossible to imagine or understand how people managed to live, for years, in places where the ground wasn’t even on the ground any longer. Judging by my own vague understanding of the Dust Bowl, its causes and impact on the lives of people living in it, this is one part of the Great Depression that is often forgotten. But, dear god, the scope of the dust storms Egan writes about, some of the photos – it scared the bejeezus out of me, especially because since the whole problem was created by our own stupidity. It’s heartbreaking to read about what the Dust Bowl looked like – all the awesome grasses and herds of buffalo – before the government encouraged people to settle and farm it.
I’ve been reading some Judy Blume lately. I did all her Fudge books over the summer and briefly forgot that she wrote books for older readers, but I’ve reread Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Forever recently, both reaffirming my opionion that Judy Blume is the best writer for teens, ever. She never shies away from telling it like it is or from showing the minor uglinesses of her characters.
I’ve also been doing the Elizabeth George thing again. My mom told me to read her as a pretty light author for all my sad, lonely Peace Corps nights, but I wasn’t real into her first book, Payment in Blood. There must’ve been an Elizabeth George fan among the volunteers a few years ago, because almost all her books are in our office’s library in Skopje, so once the memory of my mild dislike for Inspecter Lynley and Sergeant Havers wore off, I started taking the mysteries home. And they get better and better, and I love that it’s a series and I can see how her characters develop and become more likeable (like, Lynley is constantly pining after his ladyfriend – I think they’re going to get married and then she’ll be murdered, or something, but right now we’re still in the swoony “why won’t she just love me back” phase of things).
I tried reading one book of hers, What Came Before He Shot Her, which was just unreadable, full of repulsive and unbelievable characters and dialogue. I started reading it when I was on my way to Egypt/Jordan/Israel over winter break, sitting at a coffee shop in Skopje while I waited three hours for my bus to Delchevo (a town on the opposite side of the country from me, near Bulgaria – we were flying out of Sofia), reading and reading and wondering when the hell Lynley and Havers were going to show up. Only after 70 pages they hadn’t shown up, and I realized that they were only going to show up at the end, and probably peripherally even then, so I quit and borrowed The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest from my friend and read that on my trip. Good, good choice. Last week I mentioned this book to my mother while we were skyping and her reaction was so wonderful – something like “You didn’t finish that, did you? God, it was awful – I read half and then I couldn’t take it anymore.” I felt tricked by the book. I checked it out expecting a Lynley & Havers mystery and instead got some wacky /insulting story about lower-class Jamaican immigrants, which I guess is one downside to writing a mystery series or whatever. If you branch out at all your readers are as likely to feel disappointed and pissed off at you as they are to enjoy “discovering a new world”. At least when John Grisham writes a novel with “pizza” or “Christmas” in the title I can be pretty sure it’s not a legal thriller.
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