I expected to read a lot during the holidays. I was visiting my hometown, where I only really keep in touch with one friend, and I figured I’d be able to blast through quite a few books during my downtime, considering all of my time would be down. Unfortunately, I become obsessed with achieving Steam holiday objectives and barely read at all.

I did get through a couple of books, though, and A Christmas Carol was one of them. I grew up watching the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol nearly every year with my dad. It’s the longest running of the few Christmas traditions we’ve had over the years. As a kid, my dad used to cancel Christmas at least once every year, one season we got up to six cancellations, and for a five-year stint we were forced to watch John Wayne movies every Christmas afternoon, but A Christmas Carol is really the only tradition to last into adulthood.

As part of the Audible Signature Classics, a series of audiobook productions on Audible in which famous actors lend their voices to the narration of classic literature, Tim Curry presents Dickens’ holiday novella. How could you go wrong there? Curry has one of the greatest voices, so his narration was obviously top-notch. It really enhanced the reading, I thought.

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

I read half of Great Expectations when I was younger, and have been meaning to give it another try since. I remember reading that Dickens’ work was published in serial monthly installments that were required to be of a certain length, and as a result I spent my time identifying what I felt were extraneous descriptions rather than just enjoying it. A Christmas Carol is probably a much better introduction to Dickens anyway. It’s a short, familiar story that offers a quick taste of his interesting characters, hilarious wit, and loving use of the language. Reading this got me a little excited to move on to some of his longer works.

“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Hope everyone had a great holiday!

Firstly, I didn’t think the movie as was quite as bad as everyone made it out to be, but I can see where they’re coming from if they had read the book first. While it feels similar in atmosphere, it does differ in ways that reek somewhat of Hollywood tampering, and it ends up completely disregarding a fairly key point to the story.

Robert Neville is a lone and immune survivor of a disease that turns people to vampires. His life is a tedious cycle of keeping the vampires at bay during the night and hunting them during the day. At first he knows very little of what’s going on and relies on his knowledge of vampire folklore to stay alive. As he tries to find a cure for the disease, he gradually separates fact from legend.

While this keeps up my running theme of novels featuring the desperately lonely, it’s also another book that likely inspired 28 Days Later, as the vampires aren’t supernatural but victims of a disease. It’s a horror book that turns science fiction, as Neville gradually finds explanations for all of the vampire qualities we know and love. For example, the so-called vampires in the book still recoil when faced with a cross, but only those who were Christians in life. Atheists and those of other beliefs weren’t bothered by the crosses. This is because the crosses themselves are not physically damaging to them; it’s a psychological response to leftover religious superstition.

I wanted to discuss the ending, so the following is spoilerific. It’s a very short novel, so you should probably just go and read it.

As the novel progresses, we discover that there exists both live and undead vampires. The live vampires are infected but cognitive, while the undead vampires are merely kept alive by the disease and survive solely to feed.

In the movie, one percent of people in the world are immune from the disease, but in the book it’s only Robert Neville, as far as we’re told. At one point he meets a girl wandering a field who he believes to be another survivor, but she turns out to be one of the live vampires. She was sent to spy on Neville in order to understand him and eventually kill him.

The live vampires have learned to cope with the disease and are trying to rebuild a society, but they’re absolutely terrified of Neville. He stalks them during the day, killing their families, not knowing that the live vampires are humane and not just bloodthirsty monsters. They come out of their comas in the evening not knowing who will be dead among them. He’s the last of the old human race, and now that society has changed, he’s become the monster. That’s why he has become legend, which is something that failed to make sense with the changes in the film.

Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.