Lilith’s Dream, Strieber’s Hunger Uncovered

Alternative Realities and an Imagination Fully Realized

Whitley Strieber’s third, rambunctious novel in the vampire series he began with The Hunger in 1980, and continued in Last Vampire introduces a new female bloodsucker to replace the vanquished Miriam Blaylock. She’s Lilith—the biblical Lilith, first wife of Adam—and the mother of all vampires, or Keepers, who, according to Strieber’s elaborate vampire mythology, created humanity.

Bloody nonsense? No more so than than Dan Brown’s antichrist as portrayed in the soon to be released adaptation of Angels and Demons.  Grotesque? Bits and pieces.  An imaginative literary romp?  Chimera thinks so, read on.

Book Review by Hertzan Chimera

You could never play this movie the way the book is written - the viewing public has seen too much of this sort of cheap-shot denouement in the likes of Men in Black and Bobby Ewing’s series-long shower. You’d have to start the movie WITH the denouement. To fully sate this in a modern cinema-going audience jaded by year after year of blockbuster narrative, the movie of LILITH’S DREAM would have to rip its own narrative balls out in this first scene in that legendary Hall of Mirrors. 

Lilith’s Dream Plays Like a Straight Vampire Book

A simple sequel from the original HUNGER and its follow-up THE LAST VAMPIRE, this is nearly the book I’ve always wanted Strieber to tell. The book about the past. The book about the technology. The book about the history of the vampires and their human Keepers. I have always wanted Strieber to take us back in time to a place where the vampires were first born, first arrived, first started manipulating the human gene line. I wanted to be romanced by the sexual regalia of a vampire’s proximity. I wanted to fall in love with some alien creature the way cavemen of that long-ago meeting must have felt when faced with such beauty-exuding beasts that tore to the very soul of humanity. Supernatural creatures we would willingly give our lives to. Sacrifice our children. Release our own blood for them.

Such was the ancient power of the vampire.

Lililth’s Dream, Pure Narrative

When I wrote the short story RED, RED WINE with Alex Severin, I knew the depiction of our vampires with retractable ratchet-jointed bones and a secondary vagina ringed with hypodermic needles for feeding on cocks was spot on. And this book affirms my belief in that dreamlike part of the vampire legend.

These creatures can do super human things that are BEYOND the realm of human understanding. They are pure narrative. The are spell-binding horror creatures that look like your darkest fantasies. They are pure allure. They are  the sound of blood rushing through a human heart, powered by a heart bathing in aeons of vampire love juice.

Strieber is a true sensualist. I did wonder about him when I was reading THE LAST VAMPIRE. I wondered if he’d reverted to some sort of historical chronicler, a shadow of the great writer of UNHOLY FIRE which literally tore my stomach out, such was its emotional power. And he has a stunning return to form here in LILITH’S DREAM. Never has Strieber unleashed such sensual prose upon the reader, never has he been so enjoyable, so decadent.

She laid her lips on his neck. He muttered something — a prayer, she supposed, to his silent god. When her tongue penetrated the skin, he made a small, internal sound of surprise. She felt intake of breath, then the beginnings of speech in his throat. She clenched the powerful muscle that encased her stomach, doing it so tightly that a bit of digestive fluid issued from her nose and ran busily down her jaw, hot and swift. Then the muscle unwound, opening her gut with hydraulic smoothness, the suction swooping his blood from his veins.     The poetess Ashtar had called it “that movement beneath all others.”He made a long, babbling utterance of mixed confusion and fear, high with question, higher with complaint. Then his tongue began sputtering in his mouth, and his heels drummed the sodden bed. A fly rushed about her lips, frantically seeking the blood that bubbled out. 

Ah, nice. An edible little man.

 

 

Lilith’s Dream, Imagery Infused with Blood

The movie of LILITH’S DREAM would feel like you’d just dropped the tastiest, most ungracious hit of acid EVER. You cannot, simply can not start the movie by telling the viewer that Myriam Blaylock, mother of Ian Ward with her vampire-hunter lover Paul Ward, is dead. Killed by Ward’s gun. You cannot show them that Myriam Blaylock’s female lover Sarah is also dead at the hands of Ward. You cannot show Lilith like a corpse rising from an Egyptian cave like a starved rat stinking of rot. You cannot show her as a ragged mess stowed away in a fishing boat on its way to New York.

Cut to the Hall of Mirrors, really the Hall of Dreams. See Lilith and her eternal soul mate rewriting history again and again in their wicked little game of love.

Cut to the great monuments of New York growing out of an Edwardian cesspit – show how humans have grown in status and stature.

Cut to a glowing vampire rising into a blood infused ecstasy.

Whitley Strieber and Lilith’s Dream , The Open Critic Verdict

You read the end of LILITH’S DREAM and you wonder if your whole life, the whole of history has indeed been the mere whimsy of some extra dimensional being. It is the ultimate Descartian third person – and I love it. 

Lilith’s Dream, External Links

• Whitley Strieber’s Website
• Audio Interviews with Whitley Strieber
• Whitley Streiber at Wikipedia

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