Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

In Andrew Neiderman’s books, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own neurotic, homicidal, totally psychotic, and sexually dysfunctional way. Credit 114

Credit 115

Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century.

Even though two of the three great novels of the ’70s horror boom featured female main characters (Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist), V. C. Andrews was the first female brand-name horror writer, capable of selling millions of books simply because her name was on the cover. It’s no accident that her style of horror was the one originally popularized by women: the gothic. Gothic horror was domestic horror in which affairs of the heart were as important as affairs of the flesh. Its subject matter was families, marriage, houses, children, insanity, and secrets.

The sexual revolution of the ’60s encouraged a new frankness about sex, and movies like 1972’s Deep Throat made the depiction of raw sex no big deal. When the Playboy Channel debuted on cable in 1982, it was greeted with a shrug. The culture was ready for a romantic backlash.

In the ’80s, everyone was either in therapy or on talk shows talking about their terrible childhoods. Horror had returned to the shadowy bedrooms of the family home. It was up to Andrews to show us that families could house, and create, monsters.

Return of the Repressed

Like an unstoppable zombie, the literary career of V. C. Andrews cannot be destroyed. Put her in a wheelchair, throw her down the stairs, stick her in a coffin, it doesn’t matter. Because every year since 1979 there has been a new book on the stands from V. C. Andrews. Some years there have been six.

Cleo Virginia Andrews was definitely not the frail, shut-in, gothic grandma that People portrayed her as in her very first interview in 1980. The magazine committed the cardinal sins of revealing her age (Andrews was in her late fifties when she published Flowers in the Attic) and photographing her wheelchair (“I refuse to allow pictures of me sitting in that thing,” she later wrote), but she seemed most appalled by being portrayed as a victim. Andrews was nobody’s victim.

At age 15, a fall down stairs at her high school exacerbated Andrews’s back problems. A series of failed interventions left her spine unable to bend and confined her to a wheelchair. She had always wanted to be an actress; instead, her mother became her caretaker for the rest of her life (yet in all that time never managed to read a single one of her daughter’s books). After her father died in 1957, Andrews supported the family by playing the stock market and becoming a commercial artist for magazines and department stores.

In 1972 she began to write, publishing stories with titles like “I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night” in true-confession rags, but her fiction didn’t sell until she confronted her fears. “I’m writing around all of the difficult things that my mother would disapprove of,” she said in a 1985 interview. “So once I brushed her off my shoulder and got gutsy enough, I sold.” She got her guts in 1979. The story of the Dollanganger children, locked away by their mother, poisoned by their grandmother, and falling in love with each other, became Flowers in the Attic. Agent Anita Diamant represented the paperback original and her assistant sold it for $7,500 to editor Ann Patty at Pocket Books. Patty’s assessment of the writing was “it may be awful, but it is a style”—she was smart enough to see that it elicited a rabid reaction among female readers. Pushing for a big marketing campaign, Patty opted for the gender-neutral name V. C. Andrews (something the author didn’t discover until she saw the cover), sending the book onto the New York Times Best-Seller List for fourteen weeks.