Books like I Am Legend
What should you read after Richard Matheson’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Richard Matheson
- 1954
- Post-apocalyptic horror
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after I Am Legend
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Stand
Stephen King
King's plague empties America the way Matheson's empties Los Angeles, and the first two hundred pages of survival logistics are the best thing in the book.
- A plague explained
- The last man alive
- Loneliness as the real horror
- 1,150 pages, good-versus-evil finish
Great matchThe Passage
Justin Cronin
Vampirism engineered in a laboratory and then loosed on a continent — Matheson's premise given a hundred years and an enormous cast to work through.
- Science applied to monsters
- A plague explained
- Fortifying a suburban house
- Trilogy, 700 pages each
Best for the lonelinessThe Road
Cormac McCarthy
Strip out the monsters and the science and this is what remains: one man, a dwindling world, and the daily arithmetic of staying alive one more day.
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Short and relentless
- The last man alive
- No explanation, ever
Great matchStation Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
A gentler answer to the same question — what a person does with the years after everyone dies — with Matheson's flu made plausible and the horror traded for elegy.
- A plague explained
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Almost no violence or dread
Worth a look — with a warningThe Maze Runner
James Dashner
Shares the shape of a survivor deducing the rules of a hostile world by experiment, though Dashner's reader is fourteen and the prose knows it.
- Fortifying a suburban house
- Science applied to monsters
- YA, thin characterisation
Great matchWorld War Z
Max Brooks
Brooks takes the epidemiology as seriously as Matheson does, then interviews a hundred survivors about exactly how the species nearly lost.
- A plague explained
- Science applied to monsters
- Fortifying a suburban house
- Oral-history format, no protagonist
Great matchOryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Another last man narrating his own obsolescence, working out how the world ended and what the successor species is likely to make of him.
- The last man alive
- Who the monster really is
- A plague explained
- Satirical corporate-dystopia setup
Worth a look — with a warningThe Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
Here for the isolation rather than the apocalypse: a narrator alone inside a rewritten world, keeping an account for somebody who may never read it.
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Who the monster really is
- No monsters and no plague
Great matchThe Dog Stars
Peter Heller
A man, a plane and a dog, nine years after the flu — the domestic rhythm of survival Matheson invented, written this time with real tenderness.
- A dog you shouldn't get attached to
- Fortifying a suburban house
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Clipped, fragmentary prose
Best for the twist about the monstersThe Girl with All the Gifts
M.R. Carey
Carey lands Matheson's final move — that the new people are people, and you are the leftover — and does it with a fungal biology that genuinely holds up.
- Who the monster really is
- Science applied to monsters
- A plague explained
- Road-trip structure, ensemble cast
Worth a look — with a warningNever Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
For readers who took the ending as a question about who counts as human. Ishiguro asks it very quietly, with no monsters and no way out.
- Who the monster really is
- Loneliness as the real horror
- No apocalypse, no action
Great matchThe Postman
David Brin
One survivor crossing an emptied America and discovering that what people need most is a story to organise around. Brin's answer to Neville's despair.
- The last man alive
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Optimistic, almost civic
Best for the short bleak versionZone One
Colson Whitehead
Three days of a sweeper clearing Manhattan block by block, far more interested in the tedium and grief of the aftermath than in the biting.
- Short and relentless
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Fortifying a suburban house
- Deliberately anticlimactic ending
What should you read after I Am Legend?
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Stand by Stephen King — king's plague empties America the way Matheson's empties Los Angeles, and the first two hundred pages of survival logistics are the best thing in the book.
If what stayed with you was science applied to monsters, read The Passage by Justin Cronin instead: vampirism engineered in a laboratory and then loosed on a continent — Matheson's premise given a hundred years and an enormous cast to work through. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is the other strong option — strip out the monsters and the science and this is what remains: one man, a dwindling world, and the daily arithmetic of staying alive one more day.
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