I Never Read V.C. Andrews

I never read V.C. Andrews not because I wouldn't have loved it, I just didn't even register it on my teen radar. Which is funny because I LOVED Stephen King and Anne Rice for years. No one that I knew was reading Andrews's books and I don't remember them being prominent at the library. It was only when I began working at a used bookstore that I was all like, "who is this person who has an entire shelf to herself and some truly awesome die-cut covers?". I didn't read them then, either.

It wasn't until yesterday night, reading Sara Gran's story about V.C. Andrews in the new Believer magazine, that I developed an insatiable urge to read VCA. Or at least Flowers in the Attic. Incest? Check! Creepy grandparents? Check! Vengeance and retribution? Check!

From Sara's article:

Ultimately, Andrews's novels constitute their own genre, in which secrets, lies, desire, and moral corruption all stem from--and are contained in--the family. In her world, parents starve their children, sister and brother become husband and wife, and grandparents punish grandchildren for being "devil's spawn". No one is to be trusted, and few adults are who they claim to be. Most significantly, there are no happy endings. For all their teen-girl fantasy elements, the books are also gritty, raw, and extremely dirty. There is little cynical or formulaic about them. If anything, they are too raw, too revealing of the author's own obsessions--which, as we'll see, might be exactly why no one ever talks about them.

But the part in the article that swayed me was mention of an interview with Andrews (only a handful of people have interviewed the author), where her books are likened to fairy-tales, with their sometimes gruesome origins. Andrews comments, "I didn't want a real horror, like a rapist or a murderer, but I wanted a fairy-tale horror". Which made me think that reading some of her books might not be so bad.

Sara's article starts to get away from the actual books and gets into our own teen desires and sexual abuse in and the decay of the American family in the 70's and 80's. But she gives a good re-capping of Andrews's six books (the only ones she wrote herself). Andrew Neiderman, author of The Devil's Advocate, ghost-wrote the remaining books in the series. V.C. Andrews died in 1986 of breast cancer, and a cursory internet search shows that girls are still pretty crazy for her books.

Mandy

This year is the 30th anniversary of the publication of Flowers in the Attic. Read the first page of the Believer article here.
Also, check out the repackaging of Flowers by "Virginia Andrews", pictured above. Her name is actually Cleo Virginia Andrews, but her publisher thought V.C. sounded more masculine than C.V.