This article discusses Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) through the lens of the dystopian mode of writing as well as theoretical approaches to the literary genre of the utopia including frameworks presented by Louis Marin and Fredric Jameson. It also examines the geographic space of Los Angeles County from which Matheson’s novel emerges, particularly Compton and Gardena in the mid-1950s immediately following US Supreme Court decisions ruling racial segregation in housing was unconstitutional. While the monsters in Matheson’s novel are referred to as “vampires,” this article situates the novel as an in-between text in terms of the emergence of the contemporary figure of the zombie in film and literature. In this, this article regards the novel’s monsters as rather unlike gothic vampires in terms of origin and setting and somewhere in between the zombies of films like Victor and Edward Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) in terms of appearance and behavior. It also looks at the potential implications these invading monsters may have when the text is viewed as a commentary on its own historical present and the social anxieties it intervened in. In the end, this article sees Matheson’s I Am Legend as an example of dystopian fiction from the mid-1950s steeped in anxieties from the era including anxieties of national defense, nuclear war, and racial integration. At the same time, it bridges modes of writing from the gothic to the dystopian to produce a prototype of the zombie figure that exists to this day in literature and film.