ilith is a vampire who has lived in the Egyptian desert since time immemorial. One day, in the early 21st century, growing thirst sends her to investigate the world she hasn't seen since the time of the Egyptians. She is baffled and frightened by modern-day Cairo, and even more upset when her flight from
human hunters eventually leads her to New York City. At a loss in this strange environment, with a shaky command of English learned from old Humphrey Bogart movies, she searches for some form of connection with another bearing the blood of her ancient kind.
Leo Patterson is a superstar pop singer who was infected with the vampiric curse by a now-departed vampire named Miriam Blaylock. She feels little or no satisfaction in her musical career, and lives without passion, even when her thirst requires her to hunt down and drain the occasional human being. She knows that this extended life of hers is a curse that will not end even with death.
Paul and Becky Ward are married CIA agents and veterans of a special squad tasked to hunt down and destroy vampires wherever they prowl. They are now finding it hard to maintain funding for their program, because of their seeming success in defeating every vampire extant. Paul, who has prior history with Miriam Blaylock, who in fact fathered a child with her, is certain that he can also make a case against Leo Patterson.
Paul's son Ian is a teenager with a crush on Leo Patterson. Because Ian bears some vampiric blood in his veins, Paul fears that allowing Ian any proximity with his idol will awaken the bloodthirst that lies dormant in the boy. He forbids Ian to see Leo in concert. But the boy disobeys ... sparking a terrible connection when Ian, Leo and Miriam all show up at the same place at the same time.
Bound by blood to its predecessors
Lilith's Dream is the third book in a series that began with The Hunger, a hugely popular vampire novel that was made into a cult movie with David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. As such, it is no doubt greeted with significant anticipation by readers who have followed this saga since the beginning.
Taken as a stand-alone work, it suffers from the need to explain all that went before. Streiber explains all he has to, but does so in lightning strokes that impart the necessary information without doing anything to make the new reader believe in it. The boy Ian is introduced by his father's musing that the kid's part vampire and might need to be destroyed someday. Leo Patterson spends much of her time thinking about Miriam Blaylock and the events that filled previous books. Paul is baldly introduced as a CIA agent whose specialty is destroying vampires, as if this mere summary of his previously established fact is enough to suspend the disbelief of readers encountering him for the first time. Folks who read The Hunger and The Last Vampire, the previous novels in this series, might not need any more than this; they may already be sufficiently invested in the lives (or unlives) of these people. First-timers will not be so lucky.
That said, Lilith's Dream contains enough good stuff to merit a look. The loneliness of Leo Patterson's existence is persuasively rendered, in terms that make her an oddly sympathetic villain-slash-protagonist. The uncontrollable attraction among Ian, Leo and Lilith is similarly strong. And Lilith's clueless wandering through the modern world—culminating in her acquisition of a version of English learned from film-noir—is played for a comedic effect that does little to dilute her effectiveness as a creature of fear.
