Louis Whitley Strieber (; born June 13, 1945) is an American writer best known for his horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger and for Communion, a non-fiction account of his alleged experiences with non-human entities. He has maintained a dual career as an author of fiction and advocate of metaphysical concepts through his best-selling non-fiction books, his Unknown Country website, and his podcast, Dreamland.
Strieber was born in San Antonio, Texas, the son of Kathleen Mary (Drought) and Karl Strieber, a lawyer. He attended Central Catholic High School in San Antonio. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin and the London School of Film Technique, graduating from each in 1968. He worked for several advertising firms in New York City, rising to the level of vice president before leaving in 1977 to pursue a writing career.
Strieber began his career as a novelist with the horror novels The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981), both of which were made into feature films, followed by the less successful horror novels Black Magic (1982) and The Night Church (1983).
Strieber turned to speculative fiction with social conscience. Collaborating with James Kunetka, he wrote Warday (1984) about the dangers of limited nuclear warfare, and Nature's End (1986), a novel about an environmental apocalypse. He independently authored Wolf of Shadows (1985), a young adult novel set in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
In 1986, Strieber's fantasy novel Catmagic was published with co-authorship credited to Jonathan Barry, who was described as an aerospace industry consultant and a practicing witch. In the 1987 paperback edition, Strieber stated that Barry was fictitious and that he was the sole author of Catmagic. Strieber's personal publishing company, Walker & Collier, was named after two characters in Catmagic.
Strieber later authored Billy (1990), The Wild (1991), Unholy Fire (1992), and The Forbidden Zone (1993), which were less successful.
The author's short stories were collected in the 1997 limited-edition volume Evenings with Demons. More recent short stories included "The Good Neighbor", published in Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary, and "The Christmas Spirits" (2012), a modern retelling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Strieber has stated that he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York on the evening of December 26, 1985, by non-human sentient beings. He wrote about this and related experiences in Communion (1987), his first non-fiction book. Although the book was perceived generally as an account of alien abduction, Strieber drew no conclusions about the identity of the alleged abductors. He referred to the beings as "the visitors", a name chosen to be as neutral as possible to allow the possibility that they were not extraterrestrials. Neurologist Steven Novella has remarked that the details of Whitley's tale of waking up seemingly paralyzed correlated with aspects of hypnagogia, a fairly common neurological phenomenon that has been mistaken by some for an intervention by demons or aliens. Both the hardcover and paperback editions of Communion reached the number one position on The New York Times Best Seller list (non-fiction), with more than 2 million copies collectively sold.
Although it was published as nonfiction, the book editor of the Los Angeles Times pronounced the follow-up title, Transformation (1988), to be fiction and removed it from the non-fiction best-seller list (it nonetheless made the top 10 on the fiction side of the chart). "It's a reprehensible thing," Strieber responded. "My book is a true story ... Placing this book on the fiction list is an ugly example of exactly the kind of blind prejudice that has hurt human progress for many generations." Criticism that noted the similarity between the non-human beings in Strieber's autobiographical accounts and the non-human beings in his initial horror novels was acknowledged by the author as a fair observation, but not indicative of his autobiographical works being fictional. He said, "The mysterious small beings that figure prominently in Catmagic seem to be an unconscious rendering of [the visitors], created before I was aware that they may be real."
Since the 1987 publication of Communion, Strieber has written four further autobiographies detailing his experiences with the visitors: Transformation (1988), a direct follow-up; Breakthrough: The Next Step (1995), a reflection on the original events and accounts of the sporadic contact he had subsequently experienced; The Secret School (1996), in which he examined strange memories from his childhood; and Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is to Come (2011).
In Solving the Communion Enigma, Strieber reflected on how advances in scientific understanding since his 1987 publication could shed light on what he perceived, noting, "Among other things, since I wrote Communion, science has determined that parallel universes may be physically real and that time travel may in some way be possible." The book was a consolidation of UFO sightings and related phenomena, including crop circles, alien abductions, mutilations and deaths, in an attempt to discern a meaningful overall pattern. Strieber concluded that the human species was being shepherded to a higher level of understanding and existence within an endless "multiverse" of matter, energy, space, and time. He also wrote more candidly about the deleterious effects his initial experiences had upon him while staying at his upstate New York cabin in the 1980s, recalling, "I was regularly drinking myself to sleep when we were there. I would listen to the radio until late hours, drinking vodka..."
Other visitor-themed books of Strieber's included Majestic (1989), a novel about the Roswell UFO incident; The Communion Letters (1997, reissued in 2003), a collection of letters from readers reporting experiences similar to Strieber's; Confirmation (1998), in which Strieber reviewed a variety of evidence suggestive of alien contact and considered what more would be required to provide "confirmation"; The Grays (2006), a novel in which his impressions of alien contact were presented through a fictional thriller/espionage narrative; and Hybrids (2011), a fictional narrative that imagined human/alien hybrids being born into the modern world.
Additional visitor-themed writings included a screenplay for the 1989 film Communion, directed by Philippe Mora and starring Christopher Walken as Strieber. The movie covered material from the books Communion and Transformation. Strieber has stated that he was dissatisfied with the film, which included scenes of improvised dialogue and themes not present in his books. Strieber also wrote a screenplay for his novel Majestic, which to date has not been filmed.
Strieber has repeatedly expressed frustration that his experiences have been taken as "alien contact" when he did not actually know what they were. He has reported anomalous childhood experiences and suggested that he may have suffered some sort of early interference by intelligence or military agencies. Skeptic Philip J. Klass suggested in his 1988 book UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game that Strieber was too quick to dismiss psychiatrist Donald Klein's suggestion that temporal lobe epilepsy might be the cause of his purported encounters. Strieber later stated that he subsequently elected to undergo testing for temporal lobe epilepsy and other brain abnormalities, but stated that no anomalies were discovered. Klein offered further specifics, explaining that Strieber had asked him to test for psychosis and temporal lobe epilepsy; the results were reportedly negative for the former and, even though the latter couldn't be absolutely ruled out, the likelihood was deemed low. The results of these tests were reported in his book Transformation.
In Communion, Strieber wrote of having told friends over the years that he had witnessed the University of Texas tower shooting in Austin, Texas, on August 1, 1966, when he had in fact not been on campus that day: