WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US
ELIZABETH ENGSTROM
With a new introduction by
GRADY HENDRIX
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Dedication: To Michael and Bill. And Evan.
When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom
Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1985
Reprinted as a Tor paperback in 1986
First Valancourt Books edition 2019
Copyright © 1985 by Elizabeth Engstrom
Cover painting copyright © 1986 by Jill Bauman
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Grady Hendrix
“Paperbacks from Hell” logo designed by Timothy O’Donnell. © 2017 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
Cover text design by M. S. Corley
INTRODUCTION
A twelve year old girl in a one-piece swimsuit lies on her bed in a suburban bedroom. She’s reading Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Tarzan and the Ant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and everything by Shirley Jackson, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavia Butler, and Ray Bradbury, and Alfred Hitchcock’s horror anthologies, and romance novels, and all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and anything she can get her hands on, she’s shoving them all into her eyes, one after the other, all summer long.
“The only time I put on clothes,” Elizabeth Engstrom says, “was to ride my bike to the library to get more books.”
After that summer, “My head was bulging with fiction, and my soul and my heart were aching to spit out my own fiction, but I was too young. I didn’t have anything to say.”
Splitting her time between her divorced parents’ homes in Chicago and Utah, the minute she turned 18, Engstrom, then named Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, ditched the mainland and moved to Honolulu, “searching for better weather.” After eight years on Oahu, she moved to Maui, working for a radio station, and then for the only advertising agency on the island until she and the art director decided they could do it better on their own. The two of them teamed up and founded Baney, Gutzmer Inc. where they had their own clients and eventually did well enough to open a branch on the Big Island. Gutzmer wrote advertising copy, and pitched jobs, and she drank.
“I hung with the underbelly of society,” she says. “And the worse they were, the better I felt about myself. I had friends in really low places, and they were the people I was comfortable with. No real identity, living in the shadows, only coming out at night.”
For ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk. And then in 1980, she stopped. Full of pent-up, raw emotions that had no outlet, she found a writers’ group consisting of four other women. They based their process on Peter Elbow’s “teacherless writing class” in which everyone reads each other’s work and then tries to give the writer some sense of how their story was experienced by each reader. For five years, these five women met every single week, during which time Gutzmer published a few short stories here and there—in Crispin Burnham’s Eldritch Tales zine, in one of Maui’s community college’s literary journals. But until she went to Disneyland, nothing clicked.
By now, Gutzmer was sober, married and had adopted her husband’s two children, and when the family went on vacation to Disneyland she rode the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction and had a full-blown panic attack.
“You can see from the top that nobody’s even submerged,” she says. “It just goes around a track in the pool. But I was inside and suddenly there wasn’t enough air for me and everyone else, and I wanted to claw my way out.”
The idea hit her almost fully formed: what if she was trapped underground and pregnant? The novella poured out of her and she submitted “When Darkness Loves Us” to Theodore Sturgeon’s writing workshop. You can read his reaction in the other foreword to this edition, but he did more than admit her to the workshop, he found her an agent. Sandra Dijkstra signed Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, now writing under the name Elizabeth Engstrom (her married name combined with her daughter’s middle name, Elizabeth), and Dijkstra told her that if they had another novella they could submit the two together as a book.
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.