tarting in a career in the world of advertising, Whitley Strieber moved into a very different world—that of a horror and science-fiction author. He wrote the werewolf epic The Wolfen in 1978 and followed up with the vampire masterpiece The Hunger in 1980; both were number-one bestsellers and became major motion pictures (The Hunger starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon; Wolfen starring Albert Finney and Gregory Hines).
In 1985, Strieber wrote Communion, another number-one bestseller, a non-fiction account of his abduction by extraterrestrials. The book became a bestseller and a cultural sensation, and Whitley found himself on still another path as a leading voice on the subject of UFOs. Communion became a movie starring Christopher Walken in 1989.
While he may be known more for his research in alien abduction and its related subjects, Whitley continues writing novel-length fiction, such as The Forbidden Zone, Unholy Fire, Catmagic and Billy. His most recent publication is Lilith's Dream, his sequel to The Last Vampire.
Whitley Strieber's work in the phenomenon of aliens among us and its effects remain a deeply rooted passion, manifesting in his numerous books on the subject, including Transformation, The Communion Letters and The Secret School: Preparation for Contact.
What was the inspiration for The Wolfen?
Strieber: I use to walk at night in New York. I lived on the Upper West side at the time. I was in the habit of walking late at night when I couldn't sleep. When I walked to Central Park, I found
myself being shadowed by a pack of dogs—which was a surprising and disturbing thing. It was something about them—the way they just hung behind the trees. They had none of that weary friendliness that stray dogs often had. There was something contained and well put together about them. They weren't a bunch of mixed breeds either—they had a look which made them look similar, like coyotes or half-size German shepherds.
I got very interested because I didn't know what to make of them. I started asking around, and a friend of mine told me about a coydog, which is a mixed dog coyote. Coydogs are smart enough to live comfortably in urban areas, and you absolutely never see them. They have superior hearing, eyesight and smell. The coydogs might not be any more intelligent than a chimpanzee, or even less than that. But with the superior senses to help them, they are in effect, very effective in doing what they want to do.
That was the inspiration, that is where it all began. I became very interested in wolves after that. I went out at one point, to the backwoods of Minnesota in the middle of summer to track wolves—and found out you really don't do that unless you want to be basically devoured by mosquitoes.
You never use the word "vampire" once in The Hunger. Why?
Strieber: It was a literary conceit. I was just amusing myself.
Do you consider The Hunger, The Last Vampire and Lilith's Dream science fiction or horror because they are about alien vampires?
Strieber: They're both. I had no real awareness of the whole alien thing when I wrote The Hunger or The Wolfen. It was in my mind somewhere—because that imagery parallels things I did see in the real world later on—or what I thought I saw. Knowing that, when I wrote Lilith's Dream and The Last Vampire—I consciously played to it.
When I wrote The Hunger, I never heard of a blond so-called alien. I never heard of the graze when I wrote The Wolfen.
You wrote about ancient Egypt as being the origins of vampirism in both The Hunger and Lilith's Dream. Why did you choose Egypt?
Strieber: I chose Egypt because it has a very vampiric feel to it. There is something connected with the vastness in time that Egyptian civilization survived and the long time that has
passed since Egyptian civilization died. The enormity of their monuments. The strangeness of something that was with us for so long and was huge that could even die. There is almost the feeling that it isn't dead but rather transformed itself into a kind of slumber being, that in itself is a sort of time-vampire. Its presence lingers in the shadows of our world in ways we least expect and feeds off of us.
Everytime someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say "Amen"—that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we're still praying to their gods.
I find all of that quite fascinating. At Abydos, there is a temple, and 10 years ago, there was restoration work being done on it. They found some odd cartouches—it looked for all of the world like helicopters and modern jets. I'm sure that's not what they are, but seeing that can let the imagination run really free. It made me think immediately of Philip K. Dick's idea; that the Roman
empire was actually immortal, that it's still in progress and we were sort of a dream, the reality was not this.
It's thoughts like that, that led me to set my story in ancient Egypt. When you think of Egypt and how incredible that civilization was, it has been roughly 1,800 years since Egypt really disappeared as a coherent culture. It became so Helenized and Christianized that it was no longer recognized. And yet, Egypt lasted far longer than 1,800 years. 1,800 years into Egyptian civilization is still young. That is how extraordinary it actually was. The United States is 200 years old—that is a comma, a semicolon, in the vast Egyptian history.
Christopher Walken portrayed you in the movie Communion. What did you think of his performance? Did the two of you ever meet before?
Strieber: Oh yeah, we met a lot. We consumed certain quantities of alcohol together. We talked a lot. I was very annoyed by his portrayed of me. I think he made me look very much like
myself—except for the camera. I hate cameras—I would have never touched a camera. When he had the camera on himself—the complete self-directedness of that implied—is not me at all! I am an obsessive workaholic, I am very absent-minded. I do set things on fire in the kitchen all the time. My equipment does explode and fail mysteriously all the time—just like his did. That came because Christopher Walken actually saw that happen inside my house.
When computers first came out, they were very delicate. I had a service that came once a week to replace the motherboard in my computer because it would blow out. When it blew out, I just took a holiday. It was so frustrating. I love them because of the fact they're so quiet compared to typewriters. I would sit there and the more excited I got, shuffling my feet when writing, there would be static discharges and it would blow up.
Indeed, I did get the fire department to my house one time [but] it wasn't from a duct. It was because I had put the oven on self-cleaning. I was home alone, my wife and son were down at Disney World in Florida at the time. I put a steak in the oven, and I had cleaned the oven and this caused an enormous amount of smoke and the fire department came. That incident that is in the movie actually did happen, only slightly different.
Any works in progress right now?
Strieber: I always have works in progress. I am working on a script called Attack of Another Dimension. I'm getting ready to write a non-fiction book about UFOs, aliens and that sort of thing. I have another script I want to start writing if I can find anyone who wants to finance it. Roland Emmerich (the director of Godzilla, Independence Day, Stargate) is making a movie of my The Coming Global Superstorm, that I wrote with Art Bell—I'm not involved, of course, they are making it up in Montreal.
I'm very busy always. My Web site gets 20 million hits a month. I do a lot for that, I have a radio show on the Web site, I write a journal for the Web site. It might be the biggest writer Web site in the world—I'm not sure. It's the biggest Web site of its kind, dealing with edge science.
What are your thoughts on the miniseries Taken?
Strieber: I thought the ending was extremely nihilistic and depressing, because it is basically saying that these angelic, highly advanced aliens have an attitude about us. We're not good
enough because we're too violent. That we have to sit here and be left behind while the cosmos is opened up to others—because we're not up to snuff.
It is a simplistic viewpoint for the whole miniseries. The answers to the questions are much stranger than we realize.
The image of what was going on, the story presented an evil government people running around on some idiotic, one-dimensional power trip. While the good-hearted abductees are trying to figure out what is going on, and sort of tame the aliens. This whole thing is not at all related to what is happening out there.
I think it was a shame that Steven Spielberg and the people who work with him made obviously no significant effort to understand the abduction phenomenon or even to reflect on what is actually happening.
For example, if this is alien contact—then why does it have so much to do with death? People's dead friends and relatives show up in the context of their abduction in the close-encounter experiences routinely. It is filtered out by the UFO community. They want us to believe in faith. If anyone who says, "Well, my grandfather was there with the aliens," they take the grandfather part out. Because
that doesn't fit their theories. That isn't what we're suppose to do if we're trying to look at the unknown in a clear manner. If we're looking at witness' experiences, we're suppose to see what's there, what do they say they see? Otherwise, we're assuming that we already know what is happening, and we absolutely do not.
I think it is one of the most mystifying damn things in history. Here you have, on the one hand, from where I sit, physical evidence that is completely inexplicable. But you also have witness testimony that is equally completely inexplicable, which isn't even explainable by alien contact, not at all.
Taken in some respects was a lovely show. I enjoyed it certainly. But in other respects, the phenomenon defeated it, because the phenomenon is so much stranger in many ways and more wonderful than Taken.
Was Billy modeled after any real kid?
Strieber: I think Billy was probably modeled after a lot of real kids. I was deep into kids at the time. My son was about 9 or 10 then. I had little boys running all over the house all the time. Billy has bits and pieces of all of them. Probably of my friends when they were little and me—I didn't model it after any one particular individual. Not consciously.
This is how I wrote Billy. I got a letter from somebody who told me that the aliens were abducting thousands of children and that these children were disappearing all over the United States and I thought at the time, "Could this be true? Is there any reality to this?"
I got involved with various missing children groups and the FBI. And found out what the truth was. The number of children abducted by strangers is quite small. It's a horrible crime, but there isn't
loads of children disappearing in the United States from strangers. But by doing this research, I got very, very interested in the whole process of stranger abduction and why someone would do that. If you could imagine yourself going out and seeing someone else's little child and taking that somebody's precious child—how could you do that?
I got very interested in the character of Barton Royal [the novel's antagonist]. I wanted to know how he could do that. So I wrote the book to try to explore it.
Billy came in the book because I love kids. It is natural that I'd want to write a character who I thought was pretty cool.
If you were starting over, would you be a writer again?
Strieber: I wouldn't be a writer. The publishing business is consolidated, and I think it is impossible to start. I wouldn't even try. Unless you are willing to be highly disciplined and write to a very specific and narrowing craft genre and be like others are doing.
If you are terribly, terribly talented—so talented that you are another Jonathan Franzen—then you should write—because there is always room for genius. But for the regular, journeyman writer who can write a good entertaining story—I don't think there is a lot of room for that.
You're typecast as a mid-list author even before you start. It used to be that a writer would get five or six books before you were pulled and given up on. They gave you a chance to build an audience. Now, if the first book doesn't build an audience, you're gone.
Any last words?
Strieber: I'm always portrayed as an eerie, extremely scary person. [Laughs.] Actually, I am very happy. I've lived with the same woman happily for 32 years [wife Anne Strieber]. I live
a very quiet life.
Also, I didn't lie about Communion. I feel I have been punished by a lot of people and a lot of reviewers who felt that I had perpetrated a literary fraud in Communion. I did not! The events I described in Communion were described with as much accuracy as I could bring to that process. They happened pretty much the way I said they happened and I regard both rejection of me and the rejection of the validity of this experience as being fantastic, like an outbreak of cultural insanity.
The most we can do is say, "It's aliens," "I believe that" or "I don't believe that." That is a completely inadequate response to this mystery. It is much bigger than that. It has to do with our most basic meaning. And to deny it and pretend that it isn't there is to fail fundamentally.
And please check out my Web site.
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Also in this issue:
The cast of Bulletproof Monk
