Tributes have, of course, been pouring in for Matheson since news of his death was announced, with a particularly moving one from Harlan Ellison. 'I enjoyed it at the time, never knowing I was going to write a book about vampires and certainly not that it would be derived from the idea I had when I first saw Bela Lugosi.') I was pretty tired, I should have gone to sleep,' he said. (I love, by the way, Matheson's acceptance speech for this award: he calls it 'a rather dubious but interesting distinction', and speaks of how he first read Bram Stoker's novel during basic army training, on the toilet at night.

Last year, the Horror Writers Association named it vampire novel of the century, ahead of the likes of Salem's Lot and Interview with a Vampire Anne Rice took her loss in good spirits, saying it wasn't hard to be beaten by 'a man whose stories were inspiring me when I was still a kid writing everything with a ballpoint pen in a school notebook'. Matheson inspires, it's as simple as that.' Ray Bradbury, no less, calls him 'one of the most important writers of the 20th century', Stephen King has said Matheson is 'the author who influenced me the most as a writer', and that I Am Legend was 'an inspiration to me', while the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the novel 'perhaps the very peak of all paranoid SF'. In my edition of I Am Legend, Brian Lumley is quoted saying 'a long time ago I read, and I started writing horror at about the same time. And that ending! I won't give it away, for those who haven't read it, because it is just so disturbingly brilliant – but I'll remind those of you who already love the novel of the spine-chilling last line: 'I am legend.'Īnd so was Matheson, to so many readers and writers. Ben Cortman, howling outside his house every night. Then there are Matheson's vampires – written in 1954, and so much scarier, so much more interesting and memorable and believable, than the hordes of pallid high–school students who keep springing up today (and than the mobs in the Will Smith film version).

I am legend paperback