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.”
Both Black Ambrosia and “When Darkness Loves Us” reflect the monster as a creature of both incredible strength and grotesque weakness, but “Beauty Is . . .” goes further. Its main character, Martha, is developmentally disabled and was born without a nose. Her stunted mental capacity and her facial deformity brand her as a monster, but then some local gutterpunks start getting her drunk and it feels like the story is about to crow, “Who’s the real monster now?”
But Engstrom isn’t interested in a simple switcheroo. Instead, Martha is saved from humiliation and finds friends, and a lover, and the more she’s loved, the more her mind begins to heal itself, until she’s reading, and handling her own finances. As she’s welcomed into the community, she sheds her monstrosity and becomes just another citizen. When she’s treated with love and compassion, Martha is a person, when she’s treated with hatred and contempt, she’s a monster. And, like all monsters, she’s a mirror.
Engstrom’s first three stories are full of monsters, not just Angelina, but the man who hunts her until murdering Angelina becomes a cancer that consumes his life. Not just Sally Ann Hixson but her husband who patronizes her, and her son who takes advantage of her inability to say “no” to him. Not just Martha, but her father who rejects her cruelly, and the people who exploit her. If a monster is merely something that goes further than we dared dream possible—stronger, crueler, uglier, more obsessed—then Engstrom’s stories crawl with them. Because in this world there is always a monster. And often, the monster is you.
Grady Hendrix
February 2019
Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award. You can stalk him at www.gradyhendrix.com.
FOREWORD
I wish you could have been there. Yes, I mean you. Let me tell you where, and why.
My wife, whom you’ll call Lady Jayne as soon as you see her—as I did—my wife and I had come to an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to teach writing. We entered a huge room in a house that overlooks macadamia and cane fields, and is surrounded by papaya and banana trees and a symphonic riot of flowers; and there we met our class.
And Betsy.
Pretty exotic. Oh sure—Maui with its puffs of rain cloud and the dark flanks of its sleeping volcanoes wearing their rumpled capes of pool-table felt, its long-tailed firebirds and impudent mynas, its kaleidoscopic ethnics and accents, and its unfailing—what—smilingness: It’s exotic all right.
Except Betsy.
Elizabeth Engstrom is not exotic. She is a married woman with a nice husband and two great kids and a tidy home and a quiet voice with which she would no more shout than she would ride a motorcycle into one’s living room. She spoke seldom during the course we taught; when she did, it was to the point and rather noticeably her own opinion and none other, prevailing or not. Her greatest eloquence, which we both noticed from that first entrance, was a pair of eyes two clicks brighter than the brightest you have ever seen. These transmitted something quite beyond words—an intensity to learn and to understand and to do. This woman meant to get into print. Revise that. I shouldn’t have said “intensity”; I should have said “ferocity.”
This class was extraordinary. None had seen print: At this writing six of them are writing and selling, and much as we’d like to take credit, we must assert that all we had to do was scratch lightly and the talent exploded all over the place.
We workshopped manuscripts. (Workshop has become a verb.) Betsy’s twenty-odd-thousand-word story had to be put off while we went through the maze of story architecture, mood, crisis/climax/denouement, the “sound” of punctuation and all that machine-shop stuff, until the last meeting, when we had Betsy read her story aloud.
It was When Darkness Loves Us.
It was for this moment that I wish you had been there. . . . There is a thing that happens in theater when one or another of the cast is having “his” or “her” night—a very special spell that overtakes a performer; you can tell when it’s happening by two things. One, you become aware that everyone else in the cast is playing to and for the magicked one. And two, when the final curtain falls, instead of the appreciative crash of applause, there is an instant of hush before anyone moves. It’s the possibility of that hush that keeps actors—actors.
Well, that’s what happened at that reading.
Later, on the mainland, we got a look at Beauty Is . . . Our immediate reaction was to get it launched. The two stories together made a generous-enough bookful but they were not connected in any way. Betsy said I was crazy but I said, “Do it.” Her able agent said I was crazy but I said, “Do it.” Her publisher probably thought the same . . . but the publisher did it.
And now I envy you, and anyone else who has not, but who is about to, meet Elizabeth Engstrom. Behind that soft-voiced style is power, is surprise, is—well, that ferocity I mentioned. You are now introduced.
Theodore Sturgeon
Oregon, 1984
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A writer needs sustenance in many ways during differing phases of a work. Of these, I believe, dialogue is the most nourishing. I have been fortunate.
Lifeblood was contributed by Clarice Cox, Ted and Jayne Sturgeon, Maggie Doran, Madge Walls, Marie Johnson, Tonia Baney, and Shelley Nalepa, to name only a few.
Thanks to John Briley for accuracy, Sandra Dijkstra for direction, and to Ted Sturgeon for the right hug at the right time.
And a note of specific gratitude to my folks, for teaching me that molds are for plastic.
WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US
PART ONE
1
Sally Ann Hixson, full with the blush of spring and gleeful playfulness as only sixteen-year-olds know it, hid around the side of the huge tree at the edge of the woods as the great tractor drove past her. She saw her husband, torso bare, riding the roaring monster, his smooth muscles gliding under sweat-slick skin tanned a deep brown. She didn’t want him to see her . . . not yet.