Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Marginalized Monsters

Elizabeth Engstrom feels like an Anne Rice who cares about normal people. Deeply rooted in the details of hardscrabble lives, her language is heady and romantic, occasionally dissolving into a dreamy haze. But she never loses sight of, or interest in, the needs of her half-humanoid, underground incest monsters: they eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. Where Rice is mostly interested in magical people, Engstrom’s writing is most uncomfortably alive in its unflinching depictions of the drab, humdrum existences of people living on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Her cast of barflies, drifters, hitchhikers, and those who prey on them feels right out of James M. Cain’s hardboiled noir novels. Black Ambrosia (1986) contrasts most obviously with Rice’s work. Here, Engstrom’s vampire, Angelina Watson, is totally traditional—she doesn’t like crucifixes, can turn into fog, controls mens’ minds, sleeps in a coffin, sucks the blood of lovers and is not a metaphor for AIDS.

The vampire protagonist of Black Ambrosia wasn’t cursed. She was just born that way. Credit 131

Angelina bums around the country, resisting her blood hunger not because she’s noble, but because the more she feeds, the sooner she’ll be discovered by an ex-lover who’s determined to destroy her. Engstrom’s attention to mundane details—of traveling from town to town, the dangers of hitchhiking, and the crummy blue-collar underbelly of ’80s-era America—worms its way under your skin. You can practically feel the hard-packed frozen dirt beneath Angelina’s heels as she walks down the trash-choked shoulders of desolate highways.

Hot off an advertising career in Hawaii, Engstrom ditched corporate copywriting to take a fiction workshop with Theodore Sturgeon. Out of that workshop came her first novella, When Darkness Loves Us (1985), as twisted and sharp as a corkscrew jammed in your ear. Sally Ann Hixson is sixteen, newly married, relishing her first taste of sex, and pregnant. One afternoon she ventures down a long-abandoned set of stairs on her farm and finds herself locked in an underground tunnel. Frustrated, she follows the unexplored tunnels deeper, figuring they have to come out somewhere.

Wrong.

Cut to eight years later. Sally Ann lives in total darkness, eating slugs, with her son sleeping by her side. Determined for him to meet his father (whom the boy doesn’t believe in—he also doesn’t believe in sight), she claws her way to the surface and discovers it hasn’t been eight years, it’s been twenty. Her husband remarried and has four kids, and before long Sally Ann, feeling like an intruder, returns underground, taking her husband’s four-year-old daughter with her. What follows is an escalating series of revenge schemes that become deeply horrifying.

The hardcover version of When Darkness Loves Us (left) references the title novella with its cover image, while the paperback cover (right) invokes the companion story, Beauty Is. Credit 132

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Beauty Is, the story of Martha, a developmentally disabled adult born without a nose. The story unfolds simultaneously in the past, telling the story of Martha’s mother, a faith healer, and the present, as Martha bumbles into a group of drunks who take advantage of her (based on a real incident Engstrom observed). The book evolves into a beautiful mediation on love, appearance, romance, and devotion.

What makes Engstrom’s stories so memorable is that she speaks from the point of view of her monsters but never becomes their cheerleader, as Rice does. Instead, she captures the voices of women on the margins, pushed aside, hungry for the lives they’ve been denied, beating on the glass to get in. It’s their voices that linger.