Recently, though sheer coincidence, I've ended up reading two SF novels consecutively which deal with disease and plagues. There is nothing like a good plague to isolate people: when you don't know who's infected and who isn't, when you don't know whether you are infected and infecting everyone you come into contact with, that builds a wall between you and everyone else. Both books deal with that theme, to varying degrees of success.

The vampire plague in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend spans horror and science fiction, as well as providing a model for Night of the Living Dead and every zombie apocalypse movie from thereon in. Robert Neville, the protagonist, barricades himself inside his home using garlic and the sign of the Cross to prevent the undead hordes from getting in, trying to ignore their fumbling attempts to coax him out. By day he roams the wasteland that used to be his city, killing the vampires wherever they lurk.

While the similarites to George Romero's work are obvious - the protagonist is constantly under siege, a paranoid fear of infection and the infected pervades the entire story, and our hero finds that mutual distrust and paranoia prevents him from getting on with other survivors - there are important differences. The vampires are very much vampires, not zombies: they are repelled by garlic, many of them fear the cross, they go to sleep by day and bullets are useless against them. This means that while Robert is hunted by night, he can hunt them by day with impunity.

The most crucial difference between Matheson's original and Romero's work, however, is that Neville spends most of the book entirely alone. Aside from a couple of brief flashbacks showing us how the plague progressed, we don't see much at all of how Neville was before his isolation; the story begins after he has been alone for months. By the time that another human being comes his way, towards the end, his isolation has ruined him; he is incapable of trusting other human beings, and has become callous and jaded about his vampire-hunting during the day. His paranoid mindset and his lack of remorse for the alive-but-infected individuals he kills means that there is no place for him in the new society that begins to assert himself, and even when he is warned that danger is coming he is too set in his ways to flee.

It is no surprised that Charlton Heston played the protagonist in Omega Man, the film adaptation of I Am Legend: our hero is a man's man, a hard-drinking vampire hunter who kicks ass throughout the ruins and doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks. His treatment of the one woman he encounters is appalling; naturally, because this is the 1950s, she falls in love with him anyway, although it's not clear how sincere this is. Aside from this brief stumble into distasteful misogyny I Am Legend is solid gold.

To Die In Italbar by Roger Zelazny is a different case. It begins promisingly - Heidel von Hymack has become a living vessel for an ancient dual-aspected goddess of healing and disease. With careful preparation he can heal any illness; if he is careless, he can decimate a town with plagues. After a savage beating from the people of Italbar after just one such accidental epidemic, he develops a consuming hatred for mankind and begins meandering around like a deranged Old Testament prophet, bringing death and destruction to planet after planet.

So far, so good. However, Zelazny proceeds to make a number of catastrophic decisions which completely squander this good start. Firstly, he decides to make this a multiple-viewpoint novel - by my count, we see the action from the eyes of seven different characters. The likes of George R.R. Martin, Steven Erikson and R. Scott Bakker are able to use this technique to excellent effect, filling huge fantasy bricks with narratives which, thank to the constant shifts of point of view, never quite become boring. The problem is that To Die In Italbar is less than 180 pages long. This isn't quite enough to pull the multiple viewpoints trick off; most of the viewpoint characters simply aren't as interesting as the main players, so it's frustrating whenever the spotlight shines away from the central characters.

By far the most interesting character in the book is Heidel, and it's just as well: if even his parts were shoddily put-together, the book would be a total disaster. Commander Malacar, the insane black ops maniac who, along with his telepathic familiar Shind, continues a war the rest of the galaxy declared over years ago, is vaguely interesting at first, but his storyline is hopelessly contaminated by the addition of Morwin and Jackara, two viewpoint characters who seem to be made out of wet cardboard and are horribly, desperately underdeveloped. Entirely too much time is spent covering Malacar's hunt for Heidel so that he can use him as a living bioweapon, time which could be spent in Heidel's company. As for the cryogenically animated Dr Pels, the alien priest who only shows up for a page, and Francis Sandow, their viewpoint segments could be removed from the novel entirely without really changing anything.

Ah yes, Sandow. Zelazny's second mistake is to introduce this guy to the mix. Apparently, he was the protagonist of Isle of the Dead - an earlier Zelazny novel set in the same universe. He has a few pages of viewpoint time halfway through proceedings, and then he shows up randomly to tell Malacar and Jackara about the goddess inside Heidel's head, only to be shot at for his troubles. Until the climax of the novel, the inclusion of Sandow is baffling, and then it turns out his true role is that of a deus ex machina - it turns out that he just happens to be carrying a god inside his head as well, and he uses this to make the disease-and-healing goddess go away.

I make no apology for giving away the ending of the novel, because it stinks horribly and I've just saved you the bother of reading it. It is abundantly clear that Zelazny didn't have any clue how to end the story, and so he cobbles something together in a half-hearted-manner. The final confrontation doesn't even happen "onscreen" - the details are relayed to us through a telepathic conversation between Morwin and Shind. Granted, this means that the deities remain strange and potent presences which don't lose their mystique by having too much screen time, but elsewhere in his body of work - and, indeed, earlier in the book - Zelazny proves time and time again that he is perfectly capable of having a god or goddess show up and strut their stuff without them looking stupid. Heidel, murderer of planets, gets away scot free and is cured of his curse, Malacar dies somewhat anticlimactically, and Morwin gets the girl.

There's a good short story in here, if you just focus on the Heidel bits and then stop reading once he goes all vengeful and Old Testamenty, but the rest of the novel simply isn't developed at all. Overall, the book just isn't worth it.