In a suburb of Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Robert Neville is perhaps the last human alive. Everyone else on the planet has been turned into a vampire. During the day, when the creatures are comatose, he seeks them out and kills them with a wooden stake, fixes the defences on his house, strings up the garlic again, and clears dead vampires off the lawn.
At night, he barricades himself indoors and drinks himself into a stupor while the vampires taunt him and try to break in. But these are not mythological vampires such as Dracula; they include his neighbors and other people he knew. By conducting a variety of experiments, Neville learns that the condition has been caused by a bacterium to which he alone is immune. Further experiments explain all the “facts” about vampires involving fear of light and garlic, invisibility in mirrors, need for fresh blood, immunity to bullets, susceptibility to wooden stakes, and aversion to religious symbols. The true horror of the story does not lie in the fights with the vampires, but in what the life Neville is forced to lead does to him. He is totally alone, forced to barbaric slaughter on a daily basis just to survive, hanging on to a life that he does not really want to live any more.
