I am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1954)

Robert Neville, perhaps the last uninfected man on Earth, finds himself in a paranoid nightmare, surrounded by vampires. By night, the bloodthirsty undead of small-town America besiege his barricaded house. By day, when they hide in shadow and become comatose, Neville gets out his wooden stakes for an orgy of slaughter. He also discovers pseudoscientific explanations, some rather strained, for vampires' fear of light, vulnerability to stakes though not bullets, loathing of garlic, and so on. What gives the story its uneasy power is the gradual perspective shift which shows that by fighting monsters Neville is himself becoming monstrous - not a vampire but something to terrify vampires and haunt their dreams as a dreadful legend from the bad old days.