NIGHTCHILD

Baker has a serviceable idea here about a supersentient race called the Lha, products of a human-alien symbiosis, who maintain their powers only by absorbing the identity and life-force of a constant stream of victims. Threatened by an offshoot race which rejects the necessity of the physical and metaphysical vampirism, they escape to establish a supply of human victims, cunningly primed for sacrifice with a system of religious delusions, on the planet Nal K'am. Baker's hero is Lozan, an apparently human orphan who discovers his Lha identity only at the moment of his intended sacrifice. Some piquant ingenuities, unfortunately overshadowed in exceedingly murky plotting.