Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s a short and perfectly formed book. Richard Matheson is a real model of streamlined 1950s efficiency. He writes the way Americans used to make cars – every little piece is perfect. It’s a book you can read in about two hours and there is nothing you would change about it.
Your next book, despite being so short, is described as one of the most influential vampire novels around.
I Am Legend is a book from the 1950s which is probably well known now because it was made into a film last year. It’s been made into a film three times and none of the films have actually got why this book works. With the last film you knew it was going to be rubbish as soon as the writer and the director said: “Oh there are not going to be any vampires.” The whole point of the book is that it’s about vampires! If you take them out it’s like saying, “We’re making Gone with the Wind, but we’re not setting it in the South after the Civil War!
It’s not quite the first but it is the most important vampire book which is a science-fiction novel. These are supernatural creatures and they are beings of a different order who are suffering from a kind of blood disease which has strange side-effects. They are allergic to light and they need blood to feed. You need wood to destroy them because that allows air to get into the wound. It’s all reasonably well thought through with this notion that the whole world could suddenly turn upside-down. As the title suggests, the human is the monster in this world. If everybody is the vampire then a last lone normal person would be terrifying. It’s also the story of a serial killer. The character is a vampire slayer who goes through the book killing vampires. It’s a short and perfectly formed book. Richard Matheson wrote a bunch of other things I really like. He is a real model of streamlined 1950s efficiency. He writes the way Americans used to make cars – every little piece is perfect. It’s a book you can read in about two hours and there is nothing you would change about it.
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Kim Newman is an expert on horror and sci-fi cinema and a regular contributing editor to Sight and Sound and Empire magazines. He has published over 20 novels, plus many short stories and non-fiction works, and has won awards including International Horror Guild Award for Coppola’s Dracula and the British Fantasy Society Award for Where the Bodies are Buried. His work is often irreverently referential and he says that his novel Anno Dracula is literally a vampire book because it takes from other books and bleeds them dry.
