When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom
Life takes people to bad places
When Darkness Loves Us is not actually a novel, but rather two unrelated novellas collected together in a single volume.
The first story (and the shorter of the two) is When Darkness Loves Us.
It is the story of a newlywed young woman who gets stranded in a cave beneath her family’s farm. Lost in the darkness, she wanders the caverns until there is no hope of being rescued.
Quickly, she learns to survive by drinking from the pools of subterranean water and eating the slugs that crowd the slick, dark walls.
Months pass and the baby she didn’t realize she was pregnant with is born. She raises him underground.
A native of the pitch-black underworld, he is perfectly adapted to living in the darkness and doesn’t believe in the crazy things his mother talks of, like the sun, or the sky, or sight.
But as the years pass, the woman resolves to return to the surface and reunite with her son with her husband.
When she gets there, she realizes she’s been gone much longer than she ever realized. And that much has changed. Not least of which: her.
The second story, Beauty Is…, tells the tale of a mentally disabled woman left all alone in the world following the death of her elderly parents.
Chapters alternate between Martha in the present and her mother, Fern, in the past.
Gradually, we learn that despite being born with a horrific facial disfigurement, Martha was once a bright and joyous child. Then something happened which caused her to close off and become the way she is.
Something else then happens in the present which causes her to shed the shackles of the condition she had lived in most of her life.
All the while, certain shady inhabitants of the town plot to take advantage of this poor handicapped woman who lives all alone and was apparently left a lot of money by her late parents.
And we’re kept guessing what exactly happened that caused her to lose that spark she once had, once upon a time.
In both stories, Engstrom does a fantastic job of conveying her characters' thoughts, and both stories are magnificently well-told from the perspective of her protagonists.
With Beauty Is… in particular, she adeptly conveys Martha’s childlike innocence at the story’s outset, which then morphs into something altogether different once she is reawakened.
Despite the fact that these two stories are packaged together, and though a farm is a primary setting in each, there is little to connect the two stories in substance or specifics.
A major theme of each, however, is that humans are capable of the most terrible horrors. Man’s inhumanity to man is a defining characteristic of the species. Humans can be outright evil.
Whether that manifests in taking advantage or outright terrorizing those unable to defend themselves, or whether it is something deep within all of us that can be unleashed by years of isolation, When Darkness Loves Us thoughtfully explores these ideas in two highly engaging and disturbing horror stories.