And now, let's talk about a book that's been waaaay overshadowed by its uber-hip movie adaptation, The Hunger!
In 1982 and 1983 both Scott brothers, Tony and Ridley, released stylish neon-noir movies about human-looking monsters living amongst us undetected. Released just 10 months apart, both movies are centered on the lifespan of these monsters, with Blade Runner's Replicants aging too fast, and The Hunger's vampires aging both too fast and too slow.
I'd always avoided Scott's movie since I'm not a huge fan of flashy, early-80s filmmaking but when I finally sat down with it I discovered it was a classically composed film, full of long, carefully-constructed shots, with some really amazing setpieces, marred only by a choppy, studio-imposed ending. Also, all three leads (Bowie, Sarandon, Deneuve) are so painfully beautiful that on at least one occasion my TV wept.
The book is even better. In fact, I don't think it'd be going too far to say it's one of the best vampire books ever written, and it's certainly one of the creepiest, with an ending that left me sincerely unsettled. It's also so full of sex that if you're easily offended then you might burst into flames while reading. But, hey, it was the Eighties. People had sex back then.
Strieber, like Tony Scott, was in advertising before he turned to writing, and he'd just delivered his first novel, the revisionist werewolf tale, The Wolfen in 1978, which was made into a not-bad movie starring Albert Finney and Gregory Hines in 1981. He decided to do the same thing again only with vampires in The Hunger and the result is the kind of deeply satisfying, too-smart-for-its-own-good, genuinely upsetting commercial horror fiction that there's all too little of these days.
The center of the book is Miriam Blaylock, an actual vampire who's been hanging around, sucking blood since Roman times, if not before. Her blood-buddy is John Blaylock (there's a funny aside about how Miriam always recruits companions who're richer than she is because she always needs help paying the bills, and she often takes their last names). But John’s starting to age. See, Miriam is a super-strong, immortal, blood-drinking polysexual albino but she can only make baby vampires who live a really, really long time, not forever. Eventually they turn into junkie plasma-heads whom she locks inside trunks she keeps in her attic because she can't bring herself to actually kill them and she promised she'd keep them with her forever and take care of them always. And always means “always” to Miriam.
3000 years into her existence, Miriam has, literally, a lot of baggage to drag around. When John gets gross and decrepit ahead of schedule, Miriam's caught flat-footed and sets her sights on Dr. Sarah Roberts, one of those beautiful, smart, driven lady scientists horror novels are full of. She participates in one of Sarah's sleep studies where she uses her hypno powers to seduce Sarah into humping her leg and kissing her nipples, which gets Sarah all flustered. In the movie, the seduction is relatively straightforward, but the book paints a much more twisted picture of sex mixed with addiction, showing what it forces people to do, and how obsessive love can curdle into burning hate. There's also some great vampire/zombie action, a series of super-gross murders, and spare, elegant flashbacks to earlier phases of Miriam's existence that flesh her out as a pretty sympathetic Euro-trash mass murderer.
Before he was abducted by aliens in 1985, Strieber would write several more horror novels, including the truly fantastic Warday which is like World War Z but for nuclear war instead of zombies. Its YA followup, Wolf of Shadows is highly recommended. Hammered out of sheer ambition, it tells the story of nuclear war breaking out entirely from the point-of-view of a wolf and it's staggeringly good. In the early 2000's, Strieber would return to the world of The Hunger with The Last Vampire and Lilith's Dream, both of which were relatively well-reviewed.
Strieber's books are trashy and fun and they're written with a casual, but sure-footed, craftsmanship. I haven't picked one up yet (pre-alien abduction) that disappointed and some, like The Hunger, thoroughly exceeded any and all expectations.