After my previous review of I am Legend (the story, not the movie), I noticed something that I had missed: the story was written in 1954. This quite surprised me, as the writing style was not what I would expect from that time period. The feel of the story is far more modern. How, precisely, it feels ‘modern’ isn’t really something I can express. I’m sure an English major could examine the sentence structure, use of metaphors and all that sort of stuff and come up with a precise classification of what style of writing it displays and the time period that style of writing exemplified and all that. I don’t know much about that sort of thing, so I’m just going to have to go with “it feels far more modern than 1954.”

If I didn’t know what year it was written in and had been forced to guess, I’d have probably said the early to mid 70’s, and that guess is based largely on a quote on the back of the book by Stephen King saying that the story was influential to him. Otherwise, I might have gone as far forward in my guess as the mid 80’s. So realizing that the story is far older than I originally believed it to be, I need to reconsider some of the criticisms that I leveled against it previously, and see if they hold up.
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I just finished reading I am Legend, the book/(semi) short story that’s the basis of the new Will Smith movie.  I haven’t seen the movie yet (and I’m sure I won’t until it hits TV – lets face it, Will Smith doesn’t have much of a track record when it comes to (serious) sci-fi movies…)  I had the opportunity to read the book, though, and figured why not?  I mean, sure it’s a given that the story will be ruined in the translation to film, but the book will be good, right?  Well…
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