I am Legend

I bought this book because I had heard the movie was gory and I was thinking I could handle the gore more easily in book-form than in right-in-front-of-your-eyeballs-form. Actually I think that part turned out to be very true, since it didn't seem alarmingly gory to me.

Seeing Will Smith on the cover of the book made me anxious to read a story where I could picture him as the main character. It makes it so much easier to be able to put a familiar face and mannerisms and such to a book character, so that's another reason the book intrigued me. Very early on in the book, however, it was made very clear by the character descriptions that the main character is supposed to be an older, white, German guy, with "long blond hair and deep blue eyes." Um? That's when I started to get confused.

The book goes into great detail about his fight to stay alive despite all the neighbors who attack his house every night because they want to drink his blood. He's got a generator to support his electricity, he boards up his windows, he has a hot-house where he grows lots of garlic, he hangs up mirrors on the front door, he has a tattoo of a cross, he travels to Sears and the grocery store in the afternoons to do his "shopping," and he goes around from house to house every day with his homemade stakes to knock off as many baddies as he can while they're in their mid-day comas.

Then, at about 2/3rds of the way into the book, he's caught and ends up dying. Why the heck did I invest so much energy into this character only to have him killed off this late in the game?

As if I'm not already confused enough by the character switch, and then the main character dying after so much effort to stay alive, now I start into the next chapter of the book and it has absolutely nothing to do with the first 2/3rds of the book. I assumed it was separate horror stories or something but they're separated by chapter numbers, not different parts with different titles. The first one had some scary scene of some wooden doll that was alive and tried to kill a woman, and then the woman wanted to kill someone. I skipped over most of the end of that because it was just gross and scary and stupid. Then I skipped to the next chapter and it started with something like, "There were seven little girls all in a row..." and I said screw this, I'm not reading this crap. So I skipped to the end of the book and didn't see any familiar character names at all, and closed the book with a disgusted huff.

What gives with this story? Am I missing something?