On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.
This opening line of the novel is actually more substantial than it might seem out of context. The reference to the significance of sunset will prove familiar as readers learn that it is, to an extent, a contemporary vampire story. In addition, tension and suspense is created with the ambiguous “they” and the unexplained danger associated with them. The most important element in this opening line, however, has to do with Robert Neville’s concerns about getting back before sunset in order to avoid whoever “they” are occurring on a cloudy day.
Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last.
Soon enough the mystery of who “they” are is revealed as well as the significance of the difference between clear skies and cloudy days. Robert Neville, as apparently the last man on earth, is engaged in a daily battle for survival with infected zombie-like vampire creatures. But a surprising revelation is also soon made; a revelation that rarely if ever occurred in any previous horror novel: even in a post-apocalyptic horror nightmare, boredom exists.
I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.
The monotony drives Neville toward a greater understanding of the vampire-like creatures daily threatening his existence and eventually he realizes that the vampirism has resulted from metabolic abnormality causing bacterial mutation. The scientific focus on genetic abnormality and mutation not only transforms the novel from the mostly horror tale it had once been into more of a horror/science fiction hybrid, it also expands the philosophical implications of the story. By revealing how the norm has become the mutant when surrounded by nothing but those who would be considered the freakishly mutated before, the novel forces the reader to consider the real meaning of terms like normal, abnormal and mutant.
“That’s exactly why we’re killing...to survive. We can’t allow the dead to exist beside the living. Their brains are impaired, they exist for only one purpose. They have to be destroyed.”
Neville comes to discover that two different types of vampire-creature exist. One is an unthinking zombie and the other, becoming aware of the genetic causation, has developed a partial treatment that limits the full effect of the metabolic abnormality, but does not reverse it. They are a society that is more a hybrid of human and zombie and have embarked upon a mission to destroy all those fully mutated. Although the novel is set in the 1970’s, it was written in the early 1950’s during the height of McCarthyism, blacklisting and the Hollywood witch hunt. As an eventual screenwriter himself who was friends with writers working in Hollywood, such assaults on freedom of individuality and the right not to conform inspired him to challenge the pervasive mood. As a writer not wishing to be blacklisted himself, he wisely chose to couch this assault on such tactics in the relative safety of a vampire story, knowing that while Congress was busy investigating major Hollywood productions, they would hardly be likely to take notice of what has since become of the most famous anti-McCarthyism works of literature to be published at the time.
