Black Ambrosia Read online

  ELIZABETH ENGSTROM

  BLACK AMBROSIA

  With a new introduction by

  GRADY HENDRIX

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Black Ambrosia by Elizabeth Engstrom

  Originally published by Tor in 1988

  Copyright © 1988 by Elizabeth Engstrom

  Cover painting copyright © 1988 by Bob Eggleton

  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

  This is a book about a vampire.

  Angelina, the main character, is assaulted by two men while hitchhiking around the country, which awakens her vampiric nature. She kills one of them and hits the road, sucking blood to survive, mesmerizing men with her eyes, sleeping in a coffin, and turning into fog when necessary.

  This is not a book about a vampire.

  Angelina’s vampirism isn’t the result of a curse, she wasn’t bitten by a master vampire, it’s not something lurking in her DNA. She becomes a vampire because she wills it. Throughout the novel’s pages, what’s really happening is that she’s going insane.

  “Do you remember the Slenderman incident?” author Elizabeth Engstrom asks, referring to the 2014 case in which two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times in an attempt to impress the non-­existent urban legend known as Slenderman. “Teenage girls between 13 and 15 get caught up in stuff. They’re searching and they want to figure out what they are. Boys do it when they’re a little older—that’s how the military grabs them—but girls do it earlier. They’re not fully formed, they’re experimenting.

  “It’s exactly like those girls who stabbed their classmate over Slenderman. They thought about it, they became excited by it, they decided to identify with it, and then they went and tried to murder their friend. Angelina decided she would be this thing, and she became this thing.”

  Written in the first person, the more Angelina rejects reality and embraces the delusion that she’s a vampire, the more straight­forward Black Ambrosia’s narrative becomes, and the more comfortable the book becomes for the reader. Which is the problem with writing a book from an insane person’s point of view.

  “It’s the only first person book I’ve ever written,” Engstrom says. “And I’ll never write another.”

  To solve the problem of how to tether the book to reality, each chapter ends with an italicized recap of its events told from another character’s point of view, keeping the reader at least a little bit aware of what’s happening in the real world as Angelina sinks deeper and deeper into her vampire fantasy.

  So Black Ambrosia is a book like We Have Always Lived in the Castle about a strong-willed teenager trading the real world, with all its humiliations and discomforts, for a gothic fantasy, no matter how much damage that causes to herself and the people around her. But you wouldn’t be holding it in your hands right now if it wasn’t also a vampire book.

  “As I remember, we were working on the paperbacks of When Darkness Loves Us and I reached out to Elizabeth because that’s what you do,” remembers Melissa Singer, then 25 and an editor at Tor. “You make sure you have any corrections, make sure the author’s bio is right, and I naturally asked if she was working on anything else.”

  Engstrom did have another book, already completed, but she wasn’t about to let Singer see it. When she’d finished Darkness she was on a high. Darkness had done well, sold overseas, and become a book club selection. She sent Black Ambrosia off to her agent with high hopes, already planning the next stage of her literary career. Then she received a letter from her agent.

  “If this is your idea of fiction,” it read. “We are not suited to each other.”

  Crushed, Engstrom wrote “Bad Book” on the manuscript box and stuck it on a shelf, picked up the pieces of her broken heart, and moved on to her next book.

  When Singer called and asked what she had, Engstrom mentioned the “Bad Book” but said she didn’t want anyone to read it. Singer seduced it off her shelf however, and a few weeks later called and said, “To whom do I make an offer? You or your agent?”

  “When I found out she had a novel, that was the first good thing,” Singer says. “But when I found out that it was a vampire novel, that was the second good thing.”

  Because vampire books obey different rules than horror novels.

  “A lot of people who don’t read horror will read vampires,” Singer says. “They don’t think of vampires as horror. Vampire fiction is a perpetual motion machine.”

  Everyone knows the vampire backstory (ancient Greek lamia, John Polidori’s The Vampyre, penny dreadful Varney the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu, etc. etc. and so on) but modern vampire revival heated up in the swinging Seventies. In 1975, Fred Saberhagen published The Dracula Tape and in May 1976, Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire, which just seemed to keep selling. In October 1977 a stage version of Dracula starring studly Frank Langella opened on Broadway with sets and costumes by Edward Gorey, and ran for 925 performances, before closing in 1980. In 1978 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro published the first in her long-running gothic vampire series, Hotel Transylvania (now at around 30 books).

  By the time Suzy McKee Charnas’s Vampire Tapestry became a finalist for the Nebulas in 1982, vampire fiction was a big thing, and it only got bigger in 1985 when Rice published her blockbuster sequel to Interview, The Vampire Lestat.

  “Vampires are their own subcategory,” Singer says. “And readers have a lot of variety to choose from. Sometimes it’s more pop, sometimes less, sometimes people want stories that play with the tropes—vampires who can walk in daylight—sometimes they want traditional. It’s very a robust genre that never seems to die.”

  But while Black Ambrosia saw publication because vampire books sold like blood-cicles at a vampire carnival, Engstrom hadn’t even read Interview with the Vampire.

  “I certainly read Interview with the Vampire afterwards,” she says. “If I had read it first I never would have written Black Ambrosia. It was so brilliant.”

  Engstrom created Angelina because she wanted to write about a teenager with a strong will, a teenager who’s looking for something to be, a teenager who winds up choosing to become a monster.

  “Being a vampire is her thing,” Engstrom says. “She believes it and so she becomes it. When I was a teenager my thing was drinking alcohol. I wanted to be known for that. I kept beer in my locker at school. I was proud that I could drink more than anyone else. So I know that mindset. You have to be careful what you identify with because that’s often who you become.”

  Engstrom had Angelina pick vampires because they’re a little bit sexy and a little bit cartoony, which was how she saw Angelina. And as Angelina invests herself more and more of herself in becoming a monster, she finds herself falling into the left-­behind spaces of Reagan-era America.

  “When I was drinking, I used to hang with the underbelly of society,” says Engstrom, who got sober and started writing in 1980. “And the worse they were, the better I felt. They lived in the shadows.”

  As
Angelina drifts through the humdrum lives of people on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, she preys on the drifters and hustlers, johns and hitchhikers, creeping through the blue collar underbelly of the Eighties. As she walks from one nowhere town to another along the trash-choked shoulders of empty highways you can feel the hard-packed frozen dirt beneath her heels, you can feel how cold Reagan’s Morning in America felt to the people standing outside the walls of his city on a hill.

  “Horror always does better when times are tough,” Singer says. “The Eighties were the era of Reagan and there was a lot of tension in this country, a lot of divisiveness. You had serious conversations about banning gay people from schools and workplaces because of AIDS, then you had gay friends and family who were literally fighting for their lives. You had more women in the workforce, and Phyllis Schlafly telling women to go back to the kitchen. It was a tough time economically—the cost of living went up but salaries did not, and people had to squeeze to make their money go further. Horror has always done better when people feel nervous about what comes next.”

  Black Ambrosia may have captured the Eighties, but it was out of step with Eighties horror fiction which didn’t do women or monsters as main characters, and Angelina was both. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood with their seductive monsters had just started hitting American shelves, but in most mid-Eighties horror novels a book’s main character was its hero, the good person who was going to slay the monster. Angelina was the monster.

  And, as Singer notes, “I could probably name a bunch of women writing horror, but at the time it felt like the genre was dominated by men. So this book was very different because it had a female author and protagonist.”

  At the time, Tor was just dipping its toe into horror and didn’t have a lot of data about its readers. (To be honest, neither did anyone else.) As a result, they hadn’t yet clued into the fact that horror readers were primarily female, and so female main characters were rare. Which made the cover a challenge. Usually, if a woman was on the cover of a horror paperback she was presented in a highly sexualized manner and was a secondary character promoted to a place on the cover in an attempt to appeal to male readers. Putting a monstrous main character who was also a woman on the cover felt risky, so Tor went with Bob Eggleton’s “object cover” showing Angelina’s cane. It was a classy solution to a marketplace problem.

  When Black Ambrosia came out, it didn’t do as well as Darkness but it got optioned for a movie and helped Engstrom find her current agent. It also garnered a lot of fan mail from high school students. But to this day, Engstrom has mixed feelings about the book.

  “My feelings were so hurt after it was rejected by my agent that I had a bad taste in my mouth,” she remembers. “I didn’t want anyone to see it. I guess I just didn’t have any love in my heart for it anymore. I was heartbroken. But it didn’t stop me from writing.”

  The will to keep writing, even in the face of rejection, is like the will to keep living even when the world rejects who you are. When the world has no room for you because you’re gay, or you’re a woman, or you’re poor, you can either give up, or dream a new world into existence. You can double down on your identity, or you can invent a new one. And sometimes that new identity has fangs that tear apart everyone who ever hurt you, and everyone who tries to get too close.

  Angelina becomes a monster and that identity becomes her coffin, the lid nailed down tight, trapping her real self inside. But somewhere in this brutal, beautiful book that real self turns into mist and drifts away, and all that’s left of her is the monster.

  Grady Hendrix

  September 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.

  Acknowledgments

  I am fortunate indeed. My support structure is comprised of willing, talented, and dedicated friends.

  Those in my writer’s group—Maggie Doran, Marie Johnson, Geri Kaeo and Madge Walls—were indis­pensable to the construction of this book. Dot Bergstrom, Carol Bearman, Ross Nodem, and those at the Banana Farm Writer’s Retreat helped me with life’s perspective. Tonia, Steve, Susan, Nancy, Mike, Peggy, Polly, Jeannie, and Pam helped me with eternal perspective. Bob Gutzmer, Pauline Merner, and Clarice Cox continued to believe in me; Susan Bredesen picked me up off the floor every time I started to scream and beat my fists, and Melissa Ann Singer gently urged this tender manuscript off the shelf and helped me make it strong.

  Most of all, this writer needs the ongoing stability, love, and laughter (along with a few tense moments) generously supplied by an astonishing assortment of relatives—blood, step, and in-law, but especially from Evan, Eron, and Nikki.

  1

  I certainly never intended to become a vampire. The thought had crossed my mind, of course, as I im­mersed myself in literature of all types, but I dwelt on it maybe only a little more than I dealt with the fantasy of growing up to be an heiress, or a queen. Few people, I believe, set their minds on a lifetime path when they are young. I’m sure there are those who are like that; I was not. My dreams were of power over others, of that there is no doubt. I had no power when I was a child.

  But my youthful dreams were impotent; I had little self-­esteem. I was the odd duck, the misfit, and I always struggled with life, argued against it, all the while knowing I was at its mercy. The best I could hope for was an innocuous lifetime assignment, with a few plump moments of pleasure. Life would ultimately do with me as it wished, I thought. I was powerless.

  Today, of course, I know differently.

  I was born Angelina Watson to John and Alice Watson when John was sixty and Alice was forty­-three. The reasons for their childlessness up to that point are matters only for speculation since both are now dead, but I was a surprise to them, to say the least. Mother said I was a gift from the angels. Hence, my name.

  My father passed away when I was eight. I remember little of him but his big, warm hands, his thin gray hair, and his extraordinary booming laugh. He’d been a newspaperman all his life, and because of this, the whole town knew Mother and me, and greeted us on the street, whether we knew them personally or not.

  Mother and I got along on what he’d left us, supplemented by what she earned as a file clerk, and what she made working for a janitorial service three nights a week. We didn’t have a lot, but we seemed to have enough. I was never chided because of hand-­me­-down clothes, like some of the other children. I was never chided at all, in fact. I was left alone. I was always alone.

  When I was twelve, Alice fell in love with a man fifteen years her junior. They married, and he moved in with us. Rolf was his name, and he had a huge moustache and big, bushy eyebrows. He was a very nice man, good to Mother and me. He treated us well, bought us nice things, and eventually moved us to an improved neighborhood, to a new house on the nicer side of Wilton.

  I remember the first night they were home after their weekend honeymoon. I was in my bed and they tucked me in and kissed me good night, then went to their room across the hall and shut the door. I heard the bedsprings creak as two people settled down on them; then they began to creak rhythmically, and I knew what they were doing in there. I’d heard at school, but I never really believed that Mother would do something like that, especially with Rolf and his eyebrows. I crept out of bed and sat next to their door and listened.

  I remember pulling my knees to my chest, work­ing my toes in the hallway runner. My bum got cold as I sat on the wooden floor, listening to them talk and moan and bounce on the bed. I began to rock back and forth until my flannel nightie got too hot for me, and I wanted to take it off, but that seemed entirely improper, so I huddled up against the wall instead, rubbing my thighs together and chewing on the heel of my hand.

/>   Just as I heard Rolf give a mighty gasp and groan, I bit through the skin of my palm.

  The springs settled. I heard Mother talking softly, and I could imagine her smoothing the sweaty hair from his forehead as he lay collapsed atop her.

  Then the springs creaked again as Rolf rolled over, and I sucked the warm, salty blood from my hand.

  Soon I heard snoring, and in the dim light from the streetlight out in front, I could see the pattern on the wallpaper and the dark little drops that oozed from my palm. I Iicked them away, one by one as they appeared, and wiped the last one on the wallpaper next to the bedroom door.

  “I remember my father saying to me, ‘Boyd, someday you’re going to hunt something that’s just a little too smart to be hunted, or a little too warm and pretty to be killed. And when that happens, you’ll hang up your shotgun.’ He never could understand my passion for hunting, and I could never understand how he could just one day give it up. My brother, too. They just sort of stopped going out, but I kept on. There was a challenge to it, there was timing, and knowledge and fresh air and beauty. But it was never enough. There was never enough challenge, never enough beauty, never a big enough thrill. The kill always came too soon; it was always too easy; it was never just quite right. I guess that’s why I kept on—I kept looking for the right chase. I knew it was out there, I just had to find it.”

  2

  Alice died when I was fifteen, and Rolf and I mourned together for a short while. Then, being realistic, I decided it would be best if we went our separate ways. Mother had been the common thread that ran through our lives, and now there was nothing to bind us.

  I stayed with him until he sold the house. I sold what little things Mother and I had that were of any value and gave away the rest. The light-­headedness of being free from the burdens of ownership was an extraordinary feeling. I was now responsible only for myself and my small collection of carefully chosen belongings, which I folded and packed into a small cloth backpack I’d bought with the money from the sale of Mother’s jewelry.