When Darkness Loves Us

WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US

ELIZABETH ENGSTROM

With a new introduction by

GRADY HENDRIX

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Dedication: To Michael and Bill. And Evan.

When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom

Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1985

Reprinted as a Tor paperback in 1986

First Valancourt Books edition 2019

Copyright © 1985 by Elizabeth Engstrom

Cover painting copyright © 1986 by Jill Bauman

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

A twelve year old girl in a one-piece swimsuit lies on her bed in a suburban bedroom. She’s reading Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Tarzan and the Ant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and everything by Shirley Jackson, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavia Butler, and Ray Bradbury, and Alfred Hitchcock’s horror anthologies, and romance novels, and all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and anything she can get her hands on, she’s shoving them all into her eyes, one after the other, all summer long.

“The only time I put on clothes,” Elizabeth Engstrom says, “was to ride my bike to the library to get more books.”

After that summer, “My head was bulging with fiction, and my soul and my heart were aching to spit out my own fiction, but I was too young. I didn’t have anything to say.”

Splitting her time between her divorced parents’ homes in Chicago and Utah, the minute she turned 18, Engstrom, then named Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, ditched the mainland and moved to Honolulu, “searching for better weather.” After eight years on Oahu, she moved to Maui, working for a radio station, and then for the only advertising agency on the island until she and the art director decided they could do it better on their own. The two of them teamed up and founded Baney, Gutzmer Inc. where they had their own clients and eventually did well enough to open a branch on the Big Island. Gutzmer wrote advertising copy, and pitched jobs, and she drank.

“I hung with the underbelly of society,” she says. “And the worse they were, the better I felt about myself. I had friends in really low places, and they were the people I was comfortable with. No real identity, living in the shadows, only coming out at night.”

For ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk. And then in 1980, she stopped. Full of pent-up, raw emotions that had no outlet, she found a writers’ group consisting of four other women. They based their process on Peter Elbow’s “teacherless writing class” in which everyone reads each other’s work and then tries to give the writer some sense of how their story was experienced by each reader. For five years, these five women met every single week, during which time Gutzmer published a few short stories here and there—in Crispin Burnham’s Eldritch Tales zine, in one of Maui’s community college’s literary journals. But until she went to Disneyland, nothing clicked.

By now, Gutzmer was sober, married and had adopted her husband’s two children, and when the family went on vacation to Disneyland she rode the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction and had a full-blown panic attack.

“You can see from the top that nobody’s even submerged,” she says. “It just goes around a track in the pool. But I was inside and suddenly there wasn’t enough air for me and everyone else, and I wanted to claw my way out.”

The idea hit her almost fully formed: what if she was trapped underground and pregnant? The novella poured out of her and she submitted “When Darkness Loves Us” to Theodore Sturgeon’s writing workshop. You can read his reaction in the other foreword to this edition, but he did more than admit her to the workshop, he found her an agent. Sandra Dijkstra signed Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, now writing under the name Elizabeth Engstrom (her married name combined with her daughter’s middle name, Elizabeth), and Dijkstra told her that if they had another novella they could submit the two together as a book.