ABSTRACT
Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954), which focuses on the lone survivor of a pandemic that transforms both living and dead people into vampires, helped define the zombie narrative so prevalent over the past decades. Even so, readers who have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic may be better able to empathize with protagonist Robert Neville’s isolation inside his fortified home than any previous audience. Matheson describes Neville’s psychological condition in intensely claustrophobic, paranoic terms that resonate not only with the contemporary experiences of lockdown, self-quarantine, and conflicting or unreliable information regarding infection but also with the increasingly crude polarization of global political discourse, particularly the erosion of representative democracy that has reached one of its nadirs with former US President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his re-election loss. Matheson’s novel explicitly invites us to read it as political allegory of such events.
