Whitley Strieber wrote three genuinely good horror novels in six years and then published Communion, and the second fact has swallowed the first for forty years.
The horror novels came first, and they’re the reason the Whitley Strieber books are on this site. The Wolfen in 1978 and The Hunger in 1981 both took a stock monster and rebuilt it from biological first principles, which almost nobody was doing at the time, and both were filmed. Warday, co-written in 1984, is a nuclear war novel presented as reportage.
Then in 1987 he published Communion, an account of what he described as encounters with non-human entities at his cabin in upstate New York, presented as non-fiction. It sold in enormous numbers, put the gray alien face on the cover of every bookshop in the western world, and permanently reclassified him. Whether you find the book credible isn’t something this page will resolve. What it did to his career as a novelist is a matter of record.
Read the early Whitley Strieber books on their own terms. They stand up.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read The Hunger. It’s the best of them, it’s a genuinely original vampire novel, and the biology carries the whole thing.
Then The Wolfen, which does the same job for werewolves.
The Horror Novels
The Whitley Strieber books from 1978 to 1984, which is the whole of his horror career, and two of them genuinely matter.
The Hunger (1981)
Miriam Blaylock isn’t undead and isn’t supernatural. She belongs to a separate and much older species that requires human blood, that has lived alongside humanity for millennia, and that is nearly extinct.
The genuinely good idea is what she does to her companions. Take a companion and she can stretch that person’s life across centuries, and she does exactly that, and she loves them, and at the end of the stretch they don’t die. They age catastrophically over a few days into something conscious and immobile, and she keeps them, in boxes, in the attic, because she can’t bring herself to end them. She has done this for six thousand years.
The horror is time rather than blood. Predation is the least interesting thing about Miriam. What defines her is loneliness at a scale nothing can answer, and the novel is about the arithmetic of that.
Filmed by Tony Scott in 1983 with Deneuve and Bowie, which is the version most people know, and which changes the ending.
Also on vampire books.
The Wolfen (1978)
His first novel, published in 1978, and it’s a police procedural with a genuinely good idea in it.
Two New York detectives investigate the deaths of two officers in a Brooklyn scrapyard and find that the bodies have been eaten. The medical examiner can’t identify the animal.
The Wolfen are a species that split from wolves during the last ice age and adapted to live alongside humans in cities. They’re intelligent, they have language, they’ve been hunting the urban poor for thousands of years, and they’ve never been noticed, because they take people nobody looks for.
That’s the argument, and it’s the best thing in the book. The Wolfen cull the homeless, the addicted and the transient, and the reason they’ve survived is that the city doesn’t count its dead.
Strieber gives them viewpoint chapters, and they come across considerably more sympathetic than the humans.
Filmed in 1981 with Albert Finney.
Black Magic (1982) and The Night Church (1983)
The two that followed the vampires, and both are minor.
Black Magic is a Cold War thriller. A CIA project has developed a technique for remotely affecting human perception, using a device derived from a captured Soviet system, and a researcher working on it discovers what it’s actually being used for.
It’s more science fiction than horror, and it’s Strieber’s first engagement with the material about induced perception that would dominate the rest of his career.
The Night Church is a Catholic priest, a Manhattan cult, and a genetic project running since the Middle Ages to produce a superior human, and it’s his pulpiest novel by a distance.
Neither is recommended, and both are worth knowing about, because the interest in altered perception and in secret institutional programs is already there, four years before Communion.
Warday (1984)
Written with James Kunetka and published in 1984, and it’s one of the best nuclear war novels ever written.
The premise is a limited exchange in 1988. Five years later, Strieber and Kunetka, playing themselves, travel across a broken United States to report on what happened, and the book arrives as their account: interviews, documents, government forms, medical triage categories, and radiation exposure classifications.
The documentary apparatus is what makes it. Immigration checkpoints between states. A Japanese relief mission. California as a functioning polity refusing entry to Americans. And a triage system that sorts people by expected remaining lifespan.
It’s not about the bombs. It’s about a bureaucracy administering a permanent emergency, and the invented paperwork is genuinely chilling.
It was a bestseller, and it’s out of print, which is a loss.
There’s nothing supernatural in it.
Communion and What Followed
Communion (1987) and its sequels, Transformation, Breakthrough and others, are presented as non-fiction accounts of Strieber’s experiences with what he calls the visitors.
This page isn’t the place to adjudicate them. What’s worth saying is that Strieber has always been more careful than his reputation suggests. He has consistently declined to say the visitors are extraterrestrial, has written at length about the possibility that the experiences are internal, and has been openly critical of the UFO subculture that adopted him.
He also wrote The Coming Global Superstorm with Art Bell, which became the film The Day After Tomorrow, and a great deal of later fiction with the same material running through it.
If the subject interests you, start with Communion itself rather than the sequels. If it doesn’t, none of it is required to read the novels above.
The Other Fiction
He has published over thirty books, and the fiction after 1987 is largely shaped by the non-fiction.
The Wild (1991) is a man who begins turning into a wolf in Manhattan, and it’s the most personal of the later novels.
Majestic (1989) is Roswell, told as a document, and it’s his most conventional treatment of the material.
The Grays (2006) and 2012: The War for Souls are late novels that fold the visitor material into fiction directly, and they’re the books where the two halves of his career stop being separable.
Billy (1990) is the outlier, and it’s genuinely disturbing. A child abduction novel, told partly from the abductor’s viewpoint, with nothing supernatural in it, and it’s the nastiest thing he has written.
Nature’s End is a second collaboration with Kunetka, about ecological collapse.
The horror novels are the first decade. Everything after belongs to something else.
Where to Start
Read The Hunger, and read it for Miriam’s companions rather than for the vampirism.
Then The Wolfen, which is the better-plotted book.
If you want the one nobody talks about, read Billy.
And approach the Whitley Strieber books after 1987 knowing that the fiction and the non-fiction stopped being cleanly separable, which is either the interesting thing about him or the problem, depending on what you came for.
My best horror books list ranks the rest of the genre. The Hunger rewired the vampire for the eighties, against everything on my vampire books list.
