The Girl With The Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber #psychicvampire #audiobook

The Girl With The Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber is the story of a female psychic vampire, a femme fatale, a girl who just one day walks into a photographer's studio and wants to do some modelling.

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The Girl With The Hungry Eyes

Lieber published this story in 1949 and it was made into an episode of The Night Gallery in 1972 and has been made into a film twice, once in 1967 and then in 1995. It was also the title of a. Song by Jefferson Starship in 1979 on their album Freedom at Point Zero.

Our protagonist is a down at heel commercial photographer when The Girl seeks him out. Is this an act of philanthropy ? In fact as deadly as she is to all other men who covet her she seems to have a soft spot for our photographer and let’s him live, repeatedly rebuffing his attempts to engage in fatal lovemaking.

This seems a very male story. It is uncomfortable to read after the #MeToo revelations because it suggests that slapping the chops off The Girl would be an appropriate and even positive thing to do and that making a pass at a girl in an empty office is exactly what all men would and should do.

She is the only female in the story, and she is an archetype. She is a vampire and she punishes these men for their covetous lust but all the same they seem like poor saps driven to lust after her by their impulses. Again the suggestion is that it would be culturally impossible for them not to lust after her.

So the main mystery is why does she let him be? She even smiles at him. In fact he is the only man who ever meets her in the flesh and lives.

Leiber was heavily influenced by the psychological theories of Carl Jung. Remember his first degree was in psychology and his later studies were in psychology so he was clearly interested in the way the world is and how we interpret it..
The purpose of Jung’s psychology is to free oneself from identification with the unconscious and thus to be able to avoid being controlled by the archetypes.

Leiber at the end paints a picture of The Girl as a symbol of the advertising industry that wants everything for you. It is a personification of an empty promise.

The Girl is a vampire, but a psychic vampire. She draws something out of him and this makes him dizzy. It is her eyes that are the focus of her power. The Windows of the Soul.

When she appears it is like she has been conjured up. Though she looks like a girl of the street, she has no backstory, no history, nor even a name. She is a figment of the collective male unconscious.

At the end she wants everything from him, every aspect of his life he has mentioned to her. She wants his identity and his experiences even though when he was rambling on about these previously she seemed not to take any notice of them.

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