The Hunger

This is a frustrating mix of good ideas, interesting details, cardboard characters and horrible prose.

It deserves credit for what was at the time a fairly fresh take on vampire fiction. It's heavily influenced by Interview with the Vampire, in that the vampires have a secret society with roots in ancient Egypt, they aren't dead but instead hyper-alive, and they can pass on their powers by giving you some of their blood; but where Rice (until later books) doesn't really try to explain any of this, Strieber puts a science-fiction spin on it and puts the vampires up against a human who might actually figure out what makes them tick.

Unfortunately, that's also the biggest problem with the book. The middle third or so is almost entirely show more devoted to a research project, with pages and pages of technobabble and academic politics. If I had read this in the early '80s as a young fan of horror and technothriller paperbacks, I might have enjoyed this combination of the two genres for its surface shininess; Strieber does know how to get some pulp energy out of beats like "This blood isn't human!", "These brainwaves have extra high voltage!", etc. (He also deploys all the standard pseudoscience truisms, e.g. quantum theory proves that synchronicity is real, and you don't use most of your brain.) But ultimately none of this stuff matters—the scientists don't actually discover anything that will either help or hurt the vampire. And it makes the vampire look incredibly stupid, since her decision to let them study her makes no sense at all for someone who's spent 3500 years trying to avoid human attention.

But the rest of the book is about other things. There's an extensive backstory for our lead vampire Miriam, in various places and eras, trying to survive various threats while she keeps losing her chosen human companions—the people she vampirizes, unlike her, aren't really immortal. This is pretty interesting, probably involved a lot of research, and is also extremely gory. It doesn't give any particular depth to Miriam as a character, though; all we really know about her is that she would like to have a longer-term relationship, and that like all vampires, she's obsessively concerned with security (they're so determined to live forever that, in the present day, they'll only drive cars with the highest safety ratings).

The present-day storyline is about Miriam's life with John, her current ex-human consort; John's discovery that his lifespan is about to run out; and the head of that research project, Sarah, who catches Miriam's eye first because she might be able to cure John, and then because she might replace him. It's a good idea for a triangle (which became pretty much the entire focus of the movie adaptation) but there are a couple of problems here too. First, John's and Sarah's stories never intersect in any way; Strieber is so determined to keep them apart that it becomes unintentionally funny how close they can get without meeting. Second, John has basically no identity outside of his life with Miriam, while Sarah, until very late in the book, doesn't even get her own point-of-view narration—she's described either by Miriam, or by her dim boyfriend Tom who thinks things like "Sarah's miracle was the purity of her womanhood." Sarah also has virtually no agency: once Miriam decides to woo her, there's pretty much nothing a mere human can do (and unlike the movie, this is portrayed as not in any way consensual; Sarah is 200% straight, and Miriam even molests her in her sleep). So, rather than three people pursuing various goals, we basically have one person who has a chance and two who have no chance.

This is interspersed with lots of murders. Strieber clearly put some thought into how a vampire would resemble an organized serial killer, but apart from the verbose details of how they picked the lock on a house or whatever, these all kind of blur together into a lot of "Yes, we must kill people, because that's our way, and also they taste really good." There's one of these that should be particularly upsetting for several reasons (this was in the movie), but it's forgotten about very quickly. There are also some extremely clunky sex scenes; I'm going to generously imagine that the awkwardness of these was intentional, as the book often seems to take Miriam's point of view that human relationships are stupid.

It ends in a way that makes the rest of the book almost entirely irrelevant, and leaves things open for a sequel, which he apparently wrote a couple of. show less

“His stomach twisted until it felt as if it were ripping out of its body and he clamped his fists to his eyes, willing with all his strength that the vision of death before him, of deliverance into the hands of his victims, would dissolve. But it did not, rather it focused and confirmed. He realized that the demons of hell were not demons at all but the men of earth without their costumes.”

Sometimes I read a book for research to ensure that I not repeat themes from genres that I may not be aware I’m parroting. I need not to have worried about that with this book. I saw every cliché coming a league away. Was it because I’d seen the movie decades ago? Somehow, I remember it being more atmospheric and colorfully moody. I’ll have show more to rewatch it. Was it because the book had been written in 1981, a product of its time and unable to shake the Faberge Brut aftershave haze? Was it because every “campire” book and movie since has done nothing really to expand the legend of the super-sucker throughout the ages? Well, other than adding interminable backstories, new vampire-killing gadgets, half-baked science in well-worn kilns, lust-on-lust-on-lust-on-lust; blood, semen, spit, sparkles. Was it the devotion to shoehorning sex scenes between the cracks of every door—whether coffin, crypt, bedroom, or lab’s observation room—between characters who, quite frankly, had not much else going for them? I mean, she doesn’t have that great of a personality, but she’s been around, like, 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴 of years. When’s the next chance I’ll get to fuck a vampire?

Am I being hard on this book? You bet I am—sinking my fangs deep into its underdeveloped yet oversexed throat. Why was this a best seller? But then, why was the 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 series? Or the McRib (also introduced in 1981) . . . or ripped jeans . . . or FooPets . . . or Macklemore . . . the Squatty Potty (Jesus Christ, just lean forward, you lazy bastards) . . . or . . . oh, that’s right—because we’re lazy bastards. Maybe if I atomized Brut in the bathroom while squatting on an overpriced plastic gimmick, listening to the plastic rap from a limp gimmick, decorating my FooPet’s scene while scanning pages from 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟, ripped pants around the ankles and squeezing out this season’s biggest McRib, I’d get that flatlined sense of mini-euphoria each of us so guiltily crave. Oh, and the smell . . . Faberge!

Is this book really all that bad? No, of course not. I’ve read other works that’ve caused far more groaning. But it’s not all that good, either. It’s kind of annoying to read something that keeps brushing up against an original idea only to withdraw into the literary equivalent of autoeroticism. Some ideas should’ve really been augmented (her past vampire-human lovers locked in chests) and some kicked to the sucking abyss (Miriam’s mother’s name was Lamia? 𝘓𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘢? For the love of Dracula’s daughter . . .). And somehow mediocrity begets mediocrity and then someone else makes a far better movie out of the material. How it could’ve jazzed Tony Scott enough to make it his directorial debut, I’ll never know since I’ll never care enough to research that. Reading the book was enough.

Hopefully my next horror classic for research will have more teeth, less cooing, more meat, and less jiggling gristle. I’m not feeding my FooPet. I’ve got more important demons to tend to.

“Certainly dragons march there, and deep creatures crawl. When it is destroyed by injury or disease, the victim’s past disappears and he lives forever in that disoriented state that is felt upon waking from a particularly terrible nightmare.” show less

Miriam Blaylock is thousands of years old and has moved around the world, from Egypt to Europe to America. She needs to feed, but strangely for one of her kind, she also requires companionship. If humans become like her, she can make them immortal, but Miriam can only delay the aging process, she cannot fight nature entirely - one after another, her accomplices have decayed but not died, forcing her to transform and train another living servant. The answer to her problem seems to be a female scientist researching the link between sleep and ageing, who can perhaps find the antidote to the sudden physical and mental breakdown of her human slaves. Dr Sarah Roberts is on the cusp of discovery, but her last experiment on a rhesus monkey goes show more horrifically wrong and her funding is withdrawn. Miriam Blaylock's latest companion John is failing fast, and her planned replacement - a young girl who comes for music lessons - has been taken from her. Can Miriam and Sarah use each other to get what they want?

Whitley Strieber's writing is darkly hypnotic, but the premise of the novel is stronger than the superficial characters and slow pacing. Basically, although I don't think the word is actually used, The Hunger is your average vampire novel dressed in scientific theory. Instead of being defeated by advanced knowledge, like Stoker's Dracula, this creature of the night turns to modern science for assistance in keeping her pet humans alive for longer. Miriam is a powerful, sensual, threatening creation, and the various flashbacks that tell her story from ancient Rome to modern day America are almost epic in terms of history and dimension, but her human prey, Sarah and her partner Tom, are bland and flat. Who cares what happens to them? Karma bites Sarah on the ass for torturing that poor monkey in the name of progress - who wants to live forever, I ask you? - and Tom is such a whining, self-centred fool that I was glad when the obvious happened. I'm not sure if the reader is supposed to sympathise with Miriam, but I certainly did - after suffering through needy Tom telling repressed Sarah that he loves her for the ninetieth time, and then sulking when she doesn't respond as expected, I was praying for a swift ending.

I only read this on Kindle because I accidentally borrowed the last book in the trilogy from the library, but if Miriam is going to continue wasting her time on pointless people like Sarah and Tom, I don't know if I'll get that far. show less

The vast majority of vampire protagonists are male, so Strieber's tale of Miriam, a creature thousands of years old and with an incredible amount of power and knowledge, is highly refreshing. Miriam herslef, while exhibiting classic vampiric traits, seems to be a being of slightly different meter, as she has few restrictions on her power and she cannot actually create true offspring. Instead her creations (as they aren't really offspring in the sense of being children of true replicas of her state of being) shre her long life for a time before they inexplicably begin to age again and die. Strieber's theory that this race of preternatural beings is an interesting one because it creates another boundary between them and humanity that show more further heightens the predator-prey relationship and begins to think about the repercussions of science on reproduction (in both a negative and positive sense). Miriam's struggle to overcome this problem is one which is very problematic, since to create true immortality that can be conferred on humanity would ultimately destroy her own food supply and as a rpple effect would drastically change the ecosystem of the world.

In the novel Miriam does not succeed in her endeavour (hinged on the successful conversion of Doctor Sarah, who could be the key to unlocking the genetic problems with the transformation) which places her back in the old pattern of finding disposable mates, but which the film version changes drastically. Sarah becomes one of Miriam's creatures (or even a stronger version of them) and Miriam is confined to one of the storage boxes she uses to house the not-truely-dead corpses of her past lovers, thereby reversing the role of predator-prey through Sarah's superior knowledge of science and strength of character. Both storylines give readers/watchers a lot to contend with, and though different are great additions to the vampiric genre. show less

I prefer the film adaptation, if mainly for the actors.

Either way this twist on the vampire myth is interesting at times but unfortunately was a book that ticked me off so much all I remember was that the ending irked me. There's a right way to keep a reader invested enough to hunt down the sequel. For me, The Hunger didn't deliver.

Interesting. A book about vampires, but they rarely - if ever - use the word "vampire." Falls somewhere between 3 and 4 stars.

A rather original vampire story, about a lonely vampire who seeks a mate. Unfortunately her mates decline after just a couple of hundred years. Was made into a rather odd movie- the book is better!