Books With Staying Power

I accepted a Facebook challenge a few weeks ago: "Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers."

It was an enjoyable exercise that made me think about titles and authors and what has given them longevity in my life. But it was hard not to comment on my rationales. So I decided to do that here, hopeful it might inspire others to do the same. 

My first choice is I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, a stone-cold classic I reread every few years. In very few pages—it's more of a novella—Matheson creates a world ravaged by a virus that turns most of the population into vampires. The protagonist, Robert Neville, is one of the few survivors. He lives a life of isolation, foraging for supplies and killing vampires by day, hiding in his fortified house by night as his neighbors surround the house and taunt him. 

I love the new twist on classic vampire stories, including a pseudo-scientific rationale for the creatures, the post-apocalyptic, urban setting, Neville's resourcefulness, and—most of all—the incredible perspective shift at the conclusion that makes the reader recognize that "normal" and "abnormal" are concepts that depend on majority consensus. 

I Am Legend has been adapted into several movies. The best is The Last Man on Earth (1964), with Vincent Price as Neville. Other attempts are The Omega Man (1971), with Charlton Heston, and a 2007 version with Will Smith, the first to keep the novel's title. 

My first edition of the book is the Science Fiction Book Club edition shown above, but I gave it away many years ago. I now have a smaller paperback that includes some of Matheson's short stories. 

The Illustrated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1975) features photographs from various American International Pictures adaptations of his work. The book contains no copyright credits, so the provenance is sketchy—appropriate for the stories of villains, scoundrels, and homicidally disturbed people inside. 

Upping the macabre factor, the book came to me through dubious circumstances. It's a former library book that was stolen (not by me) from the stacks. As I read stories like "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," where criminals were revealed and sometimes met with gruesome fates, Childhood Me dreaded some type of cosmic retribution for not returning the book. (I still have it, as the ratty photo above attests.) Adding to the unsettling vibe is the graffiti of some young Rembrandt who added obscene comments to some of the photos. I didn't know what a "gronk" was until I saw the word issuing from Vincent Price's mouth on page 67. I used my context clues and figured it out.

As a kid, I loved Poe because he expanded my vocabulary. It was a struggle to figure out what was going on in some of his stories (the Latin at the start of "The Fall of the House of Usher" flummoxed me), but the plots were similar to what I was enjoying in various comic books of the time. Ironically, Poe's ambition was to be a great poet and magazine editor. The stories for which he is so famous today, and which make up the bulk of this and many other collections of his work, were quick one-offs written for money, always in short supply for the author. 

When asked to name my favorite short story, "The Cask of Amontillado" is often my answer. It is the perfect example of Poe's famous dictate about the "unity of effect" (see his Philosophy of Composition). Every incident, line, and detail in the story leads to the moment when Montresor buries Fortunato alive in the catacombs beneath the former's home. Why? "For the thousand injuries" that Fortunato has given him, although the reader never learns what these are. The ending also frustrates the hope that good always wins out over evil. Fifty years after the crime, Montresor still hasn't been caught. Not even the Latin at the end—In pace requiescat!—kept me from recognizing the badassery at work here. 

I had hoped to cover all twenty books quickly, but this is taking longer than expected. More titles and reminisces to come! 

'Earth Abides' and our changing mores

I first became aware of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides a few months ago, after hearing a radio adaptation on Escape! That two-part episode aired Nov. 5 and Nov. 12, 1950, just a year after the novel was published. 

Some online sleuthing told me the book had been an influence on Richard Matheson, whose world-ending vampire plague I Am Legend is one of my favorites, and Stephen King, who went all apocalyptic—and post-apocalyptic—in The Stand.

Long story short, I decided to give Earth Abides a shot. A newish re-release from 2020 includes a terrific introduction by sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson that provides context for Stewart's story. It also points out the resurgence in the book's popularity in the wake of the COVID pandemic. 

The novel itself has a lot to recommend it. The main character, Isherwood "Ish" Williams, is one of the few survivors of a highly lethal pandemic. He spends the first half of the book wandering from one side of the United States to the other, serving as a human version of Marvel's Uatu the Watcher and chronicling the end times. 

Eventually, he meets some other folks and they form a loose-knit community that survives by pillaging the past—canned food from area grocery stores, clothing from department stores, and the like. Ish finds himself a reluctant leader in this tribe, even though everybody involved goes out of their way for as long as possible to avoid creating laws and rules. It's a be-on-your-best-behavior, honor code type of deal. 

The tribe's successes and failures make up the bulk of the book's remaining pages and are often characterized by collective procrastination, waiting as long as possible before addressing various fundamental issues, like what to do when the water supply peters out. (Today, these survivors would probably be diagnosed as suffering from global trauma.)

Stewart's novel is short on action and long on Ish's philosophical musing. He fancies himself an intellectual and often comes off as stuffy or smarmy when he observes, repeatedly, that his post-apocalyptic wife, children, and neighbors are hard workers but not very intelligent. He ranges from sympathetic to insufferable, sometimes on the same page. For example, Ish observes: 

George was a good man, too, in his fashion. He was a first-class carpenter, and had learned to do plumbing and painting and the other odd jobs around the house. He was a very useful man, and had preserved many basic skills. Yet Ish always knew that George was essentially stupid; he had probably never read a book in his life. (p. 187)

The last section of the book chronicles Ish's mental decline and eventual passing, where he is seen as The Last American, a term that carries almost spiritual significance with subsequent generations of survivors, for whom "America" is a nebulous term. 

I like that Stewart intersperses the story of humanity with the resurgence of the natural world. Vignettes every few pages let readers see how various other species adapt to the fall of humanity, and how the world heals. For 1949, this is pioneering eco-friendliness. 

Unfortunately, other parts of the novel have not aged so well. In particular, the way Ish and the rest of the community treat Evie, a mentally challenged woman, is problematic. At one point, an outsider—Charlie— preys on Evie and begins to abuse her sexually. Yet the best charge that Ish and company can devise against him is that "we don't want a lot of little half-witted brats running in on us, the sort of children Evie would have." 

The book also displays a post-apocalyptic vibe similar to Alas Babylon and a few others that intimate how a worldwide pandemic or nuclear disaster might actually be a good thing, a cleansing and rebirth, a chance to live more in touch with one another and the land. Your mileage with such an attitude may vary, but I find it, I don't know, communally condescending? As if the only thing standing between humanity and perfection is a few billion too many people, so why not sacrifice some today? 

I was glad I read the book and appreciative of Stewart's far-ranging imagination. Leaning into a more philosophical take on the end of the world was a gutsy narrative move, and if Isherwood "Ish" Williams is insufferable at times, at least Stewart gives us plenty of evidence to chew on, along with contradictions in character that make him more realistic. 

After all, if each reader had to face pages of his own thoughts written down over decades, wouldn't he or she find more than a few that are troubling, disingenuous, and downright wrong? In Earth Abides, these provide verisimilitude, and no matter what readers think of Ish by the final page, they can't deny knowing him.