When Darkness Loves Us

Engstrom had already written “Beauty Is . . .” which was based on a real-life incident. On Maui, a developmentally disabled woman had gotten a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken, a relatively progressive employer at the time. A group of guys started harassing her on her daily walk to work and she didn’t know how to make them stop. They started inviting her to a bar. And getting her drunk. And taking advantage of her.

“I was horrified,” Engstrom remembers. “I thought, did I want to live in a world where things like that happened?”

Together, the two novellas were sold at auction to William Morrow. They wanted a third story to round out the volume, but Engstrom didn’t have anything she liked enough. Didn’t matter. There were hardcover sales, book club sales, European rights sales, and a sale to Tor for the paperback edition (with a now-classic cover by artist Jill Bauman). “Beauty Is . . .” would go on to be optioned twice for film.

But on Hawaii, Engstrom felt like an outcast. Racially she was haole, a non-Hawaiian, and on top of that she was from the Mainland, and to her the chasm that separated her from other Hawaiians seemed unbridgeable. So in 1986, she moved to Eugene, Oregon and two years later she delivered Black Ambrosia, her first novel, and her agent dropped her.

Told from the point of view of Angelina, a teenaged girl who decides she’s a vampire, Black Ambrosia is set in a rundown America where everyone’s clinging to the last rung on the economic ladder. Angelina walks the cold shoulders of filthy highways looking for warm blood in fleabag motels and soulless suburbs. She’s a classical vampire who hates crucifixes, turns into fog, sleeps in a coffin, and controls men’s minds. But she might also just be a teenaged girl who’s losing her mind.

“Sometimes teenaged girls can talk themselves into doing things and being things by the sheer force of their personalities,” Engstrom says. “What if a girl talked herself into becoming a vampire? She discovers she has power over men and she wants to become this thing, and so she does.”

After all, Angelina discovers (or, rather, decides) she’s a vampire after a harrowing attempted rape, and every chapter is anchored by a closing, italicized portion of the text told from a different character’s point of view, retelling the events of the previous chapter with all reference to the supernatural removed, offering up a mundane counter-narrative where Angelina is just a psychopathic serial killer.

Dijkstra told Engstrom that if this was her idea of fiction, she wasn’t the agent for her. But Tor editor Melissa Ann Singer had loved When Darkness Loves Us and she bought Black Ambrosia (and commissioned a cover by Bob Eggleton). Tor would remain Engstrom’s publisher for her 1991

Lizzie Borden novel and her 1992 collection of tiny, almost fable-sized short stories, Nightmare Flower.

Engstrom is still writing, but with When Darkness Loves Us and Black Ambrosia

she delivered three of the best monster stories ever written. Weirdly enough, they were written around the same time that Clive Barker was busy writing his Books of Blood which are largely based on the notion that monsters didn’t have to be scary, but could also be figures of pity, romance, or awe. Monsters had their own point-of-view, one which Engstrom embraced hard, making her creatures simultaneously predatory and pathetic.

Barely out of their teens, Sally Ann Hixson in “When Darkness Loves Us” and Angelina in Black Ambrosia exist in the margins, one of them trapped in a series of underground tunnels, the other trapped outside humanity by her blood lust. Circumstances push them far beyond their capabilities, and their humanity, and they find themselves doing things they never could have imagined to survive. But these harrowing ordeals don’t break them, they imbue them with a monstrous strength. Finding their power in the margins, being outsiders suits them.

“Somebody told me writers only have one story to tell,” Engstrom says. “And that’s our story. And we dress it up in different clothes and different times and places, but it’s still our story.”

When she moved to Hawaii, Engstrom had become an outsider, and also a monster.

“You think you’re cool when you can drink more than anyone else,” she says. “And you start to become the monster a little bit. You start to do terrible things to people and you justify that in your mind saying, ‘I was drunk at the time.’ You become the monster, then you justify the monster, then you glorify the monster.”