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Books : Horror
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It seems strange to find a 1954 vampire novel in Millennium's "SF Masterworks" classic reprints series. I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presents vampirism as a disease whose secrets can be unlocked by scientific tools. The hero Robert Neville, perhaps the last uninfected man on Earth, finds himself in a paranoid nightmare. By night, the bloodthirsty undead of small-town America besiege his barricaded house: their repeated cry "Come out, Neville!" is a famous SF catchphrase. By day, when they hide in shadow and become comatose, Neville gets out his wooden stakes for an orgy of slaughter. He also discovers pseudoscientific explanations, some rather strained, for vampires' fear of light, vulnerability to stakes though not bullets, loathing of garlic, and so on. What gives the story its uneasy power is the gradual perspective shift which shows that by fighting monsters Neville is himself becoming monstrous--not a vampire but something to terrify vampires and haunt their dreams as a dreadful legend from the bad old days. I Am Legend was altered out of recognition when filmed as The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. Avoid the movie; read the book. --David Langford
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Odd Thomas is one of Dean Koontz's more heavily moralised horror thrillers, but is nonetheless charming and terrifying. Odd is an adolescent on the brink of adulthood who sees dead people and has a worryingly precise moral sense; the police chief of the small town of Pico Mundo--little world--relies on him heavily. Hardly has the book opened before a dead teenager leads Odd to her killer--and we are given to understand that this is the sort of thing that happens all the time. He does not just see the dead, however; he sees the thrill-seeking dark spirits that hang around unpleasant events, and he notices, on this particular day, that there are a lot more of them about than usual. Odd is haunted by dreams of dead bowling-alley staff and he wonders whether this might just be the day when the bowling-alley massacre takes place.The tone of voice here is almost saccharine, almost sinister--Odd and his friends and his sweetheart are vivid, cute and self-righteous. This is a bizarrely paced thriller because it follows the vagaries of an eccentric with his own ways of investigating things--it is as odd as its hero's name. --Roz Kaveney