My first experience with Elizabeth Engstrom was a wildly surprising, horrifying set of novellas called When Darkness Loves Us. Her full-length novel Black Ambrosia, published in 1986, almost didn’t see the light of day. Haha, that’s a pun, and you’ll see why in a minute. Thanks to horror author Grady Hendrix, Engstrom’s books are finding new readers, like me, today.
Black Ambrosia is a confusing novel that made me feel more immersed the longer it went on. We start with Angela, a girl whose mother remarries. Then, the mother dies, and the step-father and Angela feel no need to stay together. He comes into her room at night, and while you expect something untoward, he simply cries for his late wife and asks Angela to pray with him. Later, we learn he had gone into her room to kill her, but lost the will, and he blames himself for not being stronger. What the heck?
Angela leaves town by hitchhiking for ages, like it’s her job. Yes, she runs into a perverted driver, but she takes care of him by ripping out his throat and drinking his blood. Eventually, she lives with a man who is in love with her, and somehow she works it out so that she sleeps all day, almost coma-like, and is awake at night — never going out in daylight. But one night she heads to a town dance while the man is away for a funeral and meets Boyd, and although it wasn’t obvious to me, in some way over the course of one day they are bound almost telepathically. Engstrom could have done better here, or not chosen Boyd, but the man Angela lived with. Nothing obvious happened in those twenty-four hours to make Boyd special.
At the town dance, out back where folks notoriously have sex in the bushes and smoke and drink, Angela sees a girl slap her boyfriend for saying something lewd, and sensing his pain, she gets him alone and tears out his throat, drinking his blood and bringing him what she sees as peace and love:
I hunted for pain. I found the confused, the hurting, the oppressed, and I loved them into death, into peace, into calm, into eternity.
The novel continues on with Angela tearing into people like a wild animal, filling them with “love” while she hears a song of sorts.
What is this song? Some entity — Her — is pleased when Angela kills, and when Angela comes to her senses to realize she’s a human being without friends, family, or home, She punishes Angela, crippling her, starving her, punishing her. The novel reaches its climax as Angela realizes those she takes leave their memories inside her, and the older a person, the more memories they have, which consume her. There is only one alternative, and this is why I won’t recommend this book to many of my readers: she begins killing children.
Engstrom is one of those writers who will “go there,” take you to the place that makes you so uncomfortable, whether it’s about death, sex, motherhood, whatever. I haven’t read anything contemporary that crosses that line and makes you live there for a long time in the book. When Darkness Loves Us was the same way.
Oddly, for much of the story I was confused; was Angela a person lured in by a queen vampire or demonic spirit, was she a person with mental illnesses, is she herself a vampire or a teen girl? Angela admits, “I certainly never intended to become a vampire,” but I don’t trust her. Angela longs to learn to be a person again:
The loneliness was suddenly overwhelming. I felt a need to share with someone the terrors of the night, the confusion about my past that strangled my thoughts. I needed someone to talk to, to be with. I needed to learn the definition of the word remorse, but to see how other people lived with it. And remorse wasn’t the only word I didn’t understand. Altruism was another. So were compromise and sacrifice. All those social words.
Boyd, who can see through Angela’s eyes in jolts, tracks her across the country to get her medical help. At times, Black Ambrosia reads like Angela is a drug addict who keeps hurting people and needs help. Other times, it’s like she’s the victim of a religious cult, like when she realizes, “I was pleasing Her, and surrounded by the protection of Her powerful influence, I felt safe.”
Engstrom isn’t clear, but what I do appreciate is the way I was lured in by Angela. What she’s doing, such as living in an apartment and working a third-shift job, seems so normal to her, but then Engstrom cuts in a brief interview with the police or a co-worker, and it’s revealed to readers that Angela is living in a rat-infested hovel full of feces, and that she was saying odd sexual things on the phone to customers. We don’t see any of that from Angela’s point of view, so Engstrom constantly plays with our reality.
A challenging read that hard-core horror fans who like movies like Hereditary will enjoy.
Grab the Lapels 
Hmm, not for me but thanks for sharing your thoughts
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It’s definitely not for everyone, and I’m not sure the synopsis gives you enough to decide if it is for you or not, so I tried to be straightforward.
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Wow. If ever a book called for a “Whoo Boy,” this is it! I’m glad you enjoyed(?) it – enjoy probably isn’t the right word but you know what I mean. I’m glad you didn’t hate it. LOL
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Enjoy definitely isn’t the right word, though I was curious about other books that maybe show a person who things they’re doing somewhat okay and then getting an outside perspective of how horrible things are. We do get some of that in The Butcher Boy, an Irish novel, when the child narrator doesn’t understand some of what’s happening, but I want more of that interview style. Like, “Yeah, I walked in and it was like a rabbit warren!” or something.
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You are a fearless reader!
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I was wondering which of your readers you would recommend it to, but the answer’s at the end – hard core horror fans. I hope at least one HCHF pops up and answers why? what pleasure is there in reading this?
Meanwhile I’m going to sit in a quiet corner with an old Georgette Heyer.
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There wasn’t pleasure in reading this, actually. It’s not fun or exciting or thrilling. If anything, it’s depressing and could easily be a book about a person with mental health issues who isn’t being cared for because they’ve fallen through the cracks of the system. Even Cupcakes & Machetes, my horror buddy, likely wouldn’t enjoy this one because while it is horrifying in places, is mostly sad and often slow, which is not her jam.
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Wow, what a doozy! That actually sounds kind of fascinating and confusing at the same time and I can’t tell if I want to add it to my TBR list. I actually love that cover. It’s creepy and so 80s all at once. You’ve really had some interesting horror reads this year! I think I’m going to sneak in an Elvira comic before Halloween but need to get some more horror novels in my life.
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I just responded to Bill, who asked if any of my readers would want to pick this book up, and I said probably not even you because it’s slow in places, and I know you get impatient, and it’s not action-packed, and at times it reads more like a book about a person in a mental health crisis…but then, you know, she tears the throat out of a sweet toddler, so you have that, too.
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Bit of a roller coaster sounds like!
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What Bill says, except I’d skip Heyer and go straight to Austen.
However, you’ve written this up with your usual thoughtful aplomb, Melanie, so I really enjoyed your post.
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Thanks, Sue! Sometimes I feel silly because I read someone else’s blog post and really enjoyed myself, but I can’t conjure up two cents to add about it, so I just write that I enjoyed my time.
While I do recommend Suburban Hell to you, I do not recommend this one.
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I think saying that you enjoyed your time is lovely to a blogger to hear. It’s not always possible to add a reflective comment – I agree!
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This is a great review of a book I know I’ll never read. Sounds like the author does a good job of playing with perspective and an unreliable narrator.
Is it just me or is any book with this type of 80s cover always extra horrifying?
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You were the #1 person I was thinking of who should not read this book because of the part about children.
There was a great boom in the 80s with horror covers, and I’m sad that most of those books are gone (they were made cheaply). If I remember correctly, most of the covers were done by one person!
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As soon as I read that I thought, Oh, she means me!
I just spent way too long trying to remember the title of a local cult classic book that those covers all remind me of. The book is Michelle Remembers which was published as a true story but has largely been debunked. It’s set in Victoria, BC where I went to uni and worked for many years at a used bookstore. We had to keep copies behind the counter because they would get stolen.
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Okay, I Googled that book, and old copies are incredibly expensive. It sounds neat for the way it contributed to real-life panic, but was proven false. It reminds me a little of The Amityville Horror, which was as if it were non-fiction, and seems controversial to this day. The real-life Ed and Lorraine Warren came to the house to help with the haunting. You see them later in the all the Conjuring movies.
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It’s been long debunked and out of print but now people are interested simply for the story, I guess. Victoria has the reputation for being one of the most haunted cities in Canada too so there’s a healthy interest in these kind of histories.
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Wowza this sounds dark. I can sort of see the appeal (stuff from the 80s always seems creepier) but the whole killing children thing would likely make this not worth it for me.
How has Grady Hendrix brought this author back to the forefront? Did he mention her in one of his books? I can’t remember…
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Grady Hendrix was for a while there quite famous for his book Paperbacks From Hell, a collection that describes the smash-hit mass-produced horror of the 70’s and 80’s that mostly fell out of publication unless the author was super, super famous. I reviewed a book about the smash-hit teen girl books of the 80’s and 90’s a couple of years ago, which was published by the same press (Quirk Books).
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Oh yes, Paperbacks from Hell rings a bell! And rhymes LOL
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If you want an overview of mass-produced paperback horror, it’s a great book. I listened to the book because it reads like a podcast.
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