Black Ambrosia may have captured the Eighties, but it was out of step with Eighties horror fiction which didn’t do women or monsters as main characters, and Angelina was both. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood with their seductive monsters had just started hitting American shelves, but in most mid-Eighties horror novels a book’s main character was its hero, the good person who was going to slay the monster. Angelina was the monster.

And, as Singer notes, “I could probably name a bunch of women writing horror, but at the time it felt like the genre was dominated by men. So this book was very different because it had a female author and protagonist.”

At the time, Tor was just dipping its toe into horror and didn’t have a lot of data about its readers. (To be honest, neither did anyone else.) As a result, they hadn’t yet clued into the fact that horror readers were primarily female, and so female main characters were rare. Which made the cover a challenge. Usually, if a woman was on the cover of a horror paperback she was presented in a highly sexualized manner and was a secondary character promoted to a place on the cover in an attempt to appeal to male readers. Putting a monstrous main character who was also a woman on the cover felt risky, so Tor went with Bob Eggleton’s “object cover” showing Angelina’s cane. It was a classy solution to a marketplace problem.

When Black Ambrosia came out, it didn’t do as well as Darkness but it got optioned for a movie and helped Engstrom find her current agent. It also garnered a lot of fan mail from high school students. But to this day, Engstrom has mixed feelings about the book.

“My feelings were so hurt after it was rejected by my agent that I had a bad taste in my mouth,” she remembers. “I didn’t want anyone to see it. I guess I just didn’t have any love in my heart for it anymore. I was heartbroken. But it didn’t stop me from writing.”

The will to keep writing, even in the face of rejection, is like the will to keep living even when the world rejects who you are. When the world has no room for you because you’re gay, or you’re a woman, or you’re poor, you can either give up, or dream a new world into existence. You can double down on your identity, or you can invent a new one. And sometimes that new identity has fangs that tear apart everyone who ever hurt you, and everyone who tries to get too close.