Black Ambrosia

"Elizabeth Engstrom is a writer I stumbled across when I was writing a book called Paperbacks From Hell , which is a history of the ’70s and ’80s paperback horror boom. Hundreds and hundreds of horror paperbacks filled bookstore shelves in the ’70s, ’80s and into the ’90s, before it all collapsed in 1995. I read a lot of these books to write my book, and a lot of these authors were out of print at the time. I picked up a book by Elizabeth Engstrom called When Darkness Loves Us , and it blew me away. Then I found Black Ambrosia , which also blew me away. The story is about a young girl whose parents die. She hits the road, drifts around, rootless, and she gets attacked by these two men. But when she gets attacked, her vampiric powers suddenly manifest, and she kills them. From there she drifts through America, going from town to town all through the Midwest. She’ll shack up with someone for a while, groom them, and use them as a lover and maybe someone to feed on before she kills them and moves on to her next. One of her victims, who she left barely alive, takes on the task of hunting her down and bringing her to justice. But! There’s a funny trick in this book where there’s a paragraph or two at the end of every chapter from someone else’s point of view, and you realize that she might not actually be a vampire. She might just be a serial killer who’s delusional, and thinks she’s a vampire. And it’s really left up to the reader. I’ve talked to Elizabeth Engstrom, so I know what she thinks, and I know what I think; but it’s left up to the reader, in the book. It is an astonishing book, and it’s a real tour of the dark side of 1980s America. I think a lot of people think of America in the ’80s as big hair and leg warmers and bands like The Bangles and The Go-Gos. But there was a darker side of America, of the Rust Belt, where the Midwest and these industrial towns were getting hollowed out. And all over the Midwest, there were unsolved crimes – the Ohio Circleville letter writer, the BTK killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. There was a dark, lonely side of America where people were becoming more and more isolated from each other, and there were people preying on them. Elizabeth Engstrom does such a good job of painting this world that became so economically hollowed out, and how it can so easily become a feeding ground for a vampire and become morally hollowed out as well. I talked to Melissa Ann Singer, who edited horror for Tor in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s, and she said that horror novels go in cycles, but vampire novels are always around. A horror novel can take on so many guises, but a vampire novel – and especially a vampire novel in the ’80s into the ’90s – began to become a very different thing from the horror novel. It often focused on this relationship between predator and prey. Post- The Vampire Lestat , which Anne Rice wrote in 1985, the vampire became very sexy and sexually attractive. So the vampire became this object of attraction, and vampire novels in the early ’90s began to cross over with romance novels, and became more romance than horror novels. There were people doing that before, like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who did the Hotel Transylvania series about the Count of St Germain, which started in the ’70s and ran for decades. But it was really in the early ’90s that vampire novels became romance novels about a brooding Gothic hero redeemed by the love of a man or a woman, who was in turn transformed into something heroic by loving this vampire, this monster, despite their monstrousness. That’s what happens between Buffy and Angel, that’s what happens in Twilight . So really, in the ’80s and on into the ’90s, vampire books stopped being horror, and began to follow the rules of romance fiction."