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.”