The Hunger

What is the secret of ravishing Miriam Blaylock's bizarre blood and missing lovers? Miriam herself doesn't seem to know, and she doesn't seem to be getting any answers from a team of research scientists who are testing her incredible blood, brain, and body in the various scopes and graphs of their lab. But the reader knows that Miriam is a vampire! Furthermore, we learn that her consorts - whom she has inducted into her race by perfusing their blood with her own (her leucocytes eat up their blood and change it into her own superior, absolutely disease-resistant purple liquid) - are stored away in coffins in her Sutton Place attic. . . un-dead but not alive (reduced to very messy stuff that squishes and perhaps has tentacles) until the end of time! But now Miriam's latest consort-lover John has suddenly lost his sublime body tone, falling into overnight decay after 200 years of resistance to aging, gulping down a slew of vampirical victims in a crazed effort to hole off encoffining. So Miriam has decided on a new consort (with lesbian overtones): top anti-aging scientist Dr. Sarah Roberts. And to seduce Sarah, Miriam offers herself as a subject in Sarah's famed sleep lab: while the scientists go wild with joy over Miriam's weird physiology, she successfully transfers her insatiable cravings to Sarah - who at last is taken into the vampirical race and sucks the life out of her own lover, Tom. Balderdash? Absolutely. But Strieber (The Wolfen), calling up some genuine echoes of the Dracula original, combines the lurid fun with a real sense of the transcendent aspect of vampire fiction at its best - those immortal longings, that overwhelming nostalgia. Surefire chills for the Transylvanically inclined. (Kirkus Reviews)