The second entry of Valancourt Books Paperbacks from Hell series inspired by horror author Grady Hendrix is a rerelease of a 1985 volume by Elizabeth Engstrom, featuring the superbly creepy art by Jill Bauman, a specialist in depicting dolls on horror covers. The book is actually a pairing of two Engstrom novellas: When Darkness Loves Us, which gives the book its title, and Beauty Is, which provides inspiration for Bauman’s cover art.
Two very different types of horror stories, the novellas are linked by female protagonists who struggle to survive the difficult situations of their lives and maintain control and choice in directing their futures. Even while focused on women, Engstrom generally writes about everyday people, the downtrodden and those without obvious hope or means. Even amid the horrors that life inflicts upon her protagonists, she writes them with tremendous empathy, often with a rapturous prose that betrays sympathy for those cast as monsters through violence or exploitation.
Of the two novellas, I find When Darkness Loves Us to be the most inventive and shocking, a story that leans into insanity and horror in the most entertaining of ways. Sixteen-year-old Sally Ann finds herself a new bride to Michael, a simple local farmer, and freshly pregnant. One day, walking on the familiar farmland, she comes across stairs leading down into a tunnel she used to play near. However, once entering, she finds herself locked in by the men of the family who happen to notice the open door and close it, without realizing she is within. Sally Ann explores deeper, looking for escape. Flash forward years later, and Sally Ann remains in her subterranean world of isolation, living off slugs and small fish, nursing a son who has been born within. Finally finding an exit from her underground world, Sally Ann rises to the surface to find that Michael has remarried and now has several other children. Unwelcome by her human past, Sally Ann chooses to return underground to her son, and brings one of Michael’s young daughters with her.
When Darkness Loves Us quickly turns into a twisted tale of revenge and incest, in a strange world without light or sight where the lines between what is human blur. And it’s brilliant. Engstrom writes from Sally Ann’s point of view to show a psychological descent that mirrors her physical journey and life underground. What is real and what is imagined become less certain. But what comes from a woman forgotten and discarded, Engstrom could not make clearer. Reading this novella now evokes images from Neil Marshall’s The Descent, a movie that follows a very different plot in a very different era, yet shares core thematic elements and of course setting with Engstrom’s novella.
The second novella of the book, Beauty Is, is no less accomplished than the first, and is arguably a superior work of literature with a far stronger emotional punch. However, it lacks the creepy, demented factors that make When Darkness Loves Us so enjoyable for me. Also unlike the first novella, Beauty Is reads as far more optimistic, even with its elements of horrific human nature. Martha is a woman born without a nose, with developmental disability and a sheltered upbringing that leaves her more childlike in her mentality and experiences.
As Engstrom reveals details of Martha’s past and her mother, she relates present events as Martha tries to navigate a newfound life of independence following that mother’s death. The germ of the story began from a real life event where Engstrom observed drunken men at a bar take advantage of a woman with mental disability. Engstrom repeats a fictionalized version of that in Martha’s life, as Martha tries to figure out how to carry out transactions at the bank regarding her inheritance, but is reliant on the advice and aid of others in town who may have more than her interests at heart. But Engstrom also expands the incidents of exploitation with deeper complexity, such as with a friendship that Martha begins to have with a local woman, that soon reveals the selfishness that might be the real foundation of some ‘friendships.’
Through these difficulties, Engstrom relates a very human story that shows Martha’s growth and resilience and reveals the possibilities of love (in its myriad forms) in holding out even amid horrors. Through this, Engstrom reveals her profound ability to write with unflinching frankness about the gritty, dirty evils of human existence while also depicting a path to the complete opposite with just as much simple honesty. Casting her gaze and words upon ‘imperfections,’ Engstrom’s two novellas here show just how imperfections can be both the source of depravity and beauty; physical imperfections are inherently neither, just like imperfect humanity is neither completely good or evil.
Engstrom’s vampire novel Black Ambrosia is a later release in the Paperbacks from Hell series, so we’ll be eagerly returning to her in the future. She’s still writing, with her latest novel The Itinerant published in 2021. While only some of her earliest work would technically qualify for our Mining the Genre Asteroid features, I’d say that she fits as an author whose work – past, present, or future – deserves broader genre recognition and readership.
