John Blaylock and Miriam are hunting. John’s target is Faye, a teenaged girl. Miriam’s target is Faye’s boyfriend. If one of these teenagers suddenly disappeared questions might get asked. If they both disappear at the same time it will be assumed that they ran off together. It is important that no questions should get asked. Good clean kills with no traces left, that’s the objective.
John and Miriam are very much in love. They’re a typical couple except that Miriam is a bit older than John. Several thousand years older. John isn’t even 200 years old. John and Miriam are vampires.
John has noticed something recently, something slightly disturbing. He doesn’t know what it means. Miriam knows exactly what it means. She has been dreading this. She loves John. She has loved all of them, and has lost all of them. Like the others John is not a true vampire. Miriam is sure there must be a way to make her lovers immortal like herself. She can’t go on losing those she loves after only a few centuries.
She suspects that Dr Sarah Roberts might have accidentally stumbled upon the key. Sarah is a sleep researcher and has discovered something extraordinary about the links between sleep and ageing. Persuading Sarah to help her will be tricky, but it could be done.
The clever thing here is that even when Sarah becomes totally enmeshed in Miriam’s scheme she has no idea that she is dealing with a vampire. Miriam does something very unexpected. Something that you do not expect a vampire to do. She deliberately puts herself in the hands of scientists (Sarah and her team). She allows them to study her, knowing that they are very quickly going to realise that there are things about her that are wildly outside the normal human parameters. Her blood composition is bizarre. Her sleep patterns are bizarre.
But what’s really clever about Miriam’s scheme is that the scientists are not going to realise that she’s a vampire. That possibility will never occur to them, it could never occur to them, because vampires do not exist. And she has been very careful to ensure that they do not have possession of a single item of knowledge about her that might suggest the possibility that she is non-human. She appears to be a 30-year-old woman so that’s what they assume she is. They do not suspect that she is thousands of years old. They know nothing of her blood-drinking. They have no way of knowing that she has killed thousands of times. And they do not for a second suspect that she might be dangerous.
There are three separate species in this book. There are the humans of course. There’s Miriam. She is a true vampire. She is not human. She belongs to a closely related but distinct species. And there are the transformed vampires, such as John Blaylock. They are hybrids. The transformation has made them vampires of a sort. They have many of the characteristics of vampires. But they are not true vampires. They are both vampire and human.
Strieber uses this fact to explore the moral issues connected to vampirism in interesting ways. Miriam fees no remorse whatsoever about killing humans in order to feed. She likes humans. She is genuinely fond of them and in some ways she admires them. But she regards them the way a farmer regards his livestock. He may be quite fond of his cows but he accepts that the time will come when they have to be eaten. Miriam does not consider herself to be a murderess. To some extent she regards transformed humans such as John Blaylock as much-loved pets. We might love a dog very much but the dog is a pet, not a human lover.
John has never quite come to terms with the need to kill because he is aware that he is still partly human. It feels like cannibalism. It feels like murder. He has become accustomed to it, reconciled to it, he has even come to enjoy the hunt, but he is still not entirely comfortable with it.
The human scientists and doctors have no more respect for Miriam’s rights than she has for her victims. They think of her the way they think of their lab animals. As far as they’re concerned she has no more rights than one of the rhesus monkeys on which they experiment. And they treat her this way even though they have no knowledge of her true nature. They think she’s human. They just think that she is so unusual that they are justified in treating her like a lab rat. The humans in this story are morally no better than the vampires.
The book is very concerned with morality but treats the subject in a very complex and provocative way.
This is also a story about love and loss, but love of an unusual kind.
Strieber creates a very complicated and elaborate and original vampire mythology, but it’s not a mythology as such. This is a science fiction novel. He also gives Miriam and John very detailed backstories. None of these things would have worked in a movie so the 1983 movie very wisely focuses on the emotional implications of the story. The novel and the movie are therefore very very different but I love them both equally.
The Hunger is a fascinating science fiction vampire tale. Highly recommended.
I’ve also reviewed the movie, The Hunger (1983).
