Bingowings said:

Richard Matheson 87.

How did I miss this. :( Another one of the few great remaining American writers gone.

I Am Legend is one of my all time favorite books. It is genuinely unsettling, is a fun demythologization of the vampire legends, and it has a really great twist ending. A great short read that will give you chills.

George Romero is considered the father of the zombie genre we have today, and has admitted numerous times that the inspiration for his zombies was the original film adaption of I Am Legend 1964's The Last Man on Earth. Out of the three films based on I Am Legend, it is the only one that actually follows the plot of the book, however it changes the hoards from vampires into unspecified reanimated corpses. The very idea of some kind of infection reanimating the dead began with Matheson's I Am Legend.

This man was the grandfather of the zombie genre, and he wrote some really great and thought provoking stuff.

R.I.P.

For anyone who has never read anything by Richard Matheson, the short story Born of Man and Woman might take you the better part of 10 - 15 minutes to read, if that, but you may just find it lingering in your mind for the next several days.

JEDIT: Oh yeah, and he also wrote:

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, the Twilight Zone episode about the gremlin on the wing of the plane, which was later parodied by The Simpsons, and also remade for the 1980's Twilight Zone movie.

Duel, a 1971 film directed by Steven Spielberg about a demonic tanker truck stalking a single motorist for the duration of the film. Great fun.

He also wrote an episode of Star Trek TOS, The Enemy Within.