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When He Met “Them”
The enduring importance of Whitley Strieber’s Communion
‘Tis the season of pagan retentions. In honor of the unknown, my Christmas read is Communion by Whitley Strieber.
I am revisiting a book I first encountered more than 12 years ago. Strieber’s memoir records the experiences of a successful writer torn from his Hudson Valley, New York, surroundings and thrust into a series of disorienting and terrifying encounters with unknown beings.
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Whitley Strieber’s account has impacted our culture. His record gave voice and vividness to other people who had experienced anomalous encounters and the isolation and disorientation such things can bring. It is not uncommon in our society that a narrative is required to announce a theme that swaths of the public have been struggling to express. Such a narrative arrives and suddenly a language, reference points, and a framework become available. That is what Communion provided. But it did more.
Whitley has resisted precise definition of what his experiences were. We call them extraterrestrial or abductive because those were the points of reference our culture most readily possessed when the book appeared in 1987 and in the years immediately ahead. But Whitley’s record demonstrates a posterity unbound by first…
