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

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986, Andrews hid her condition as long as she could; in December of that year, with 24 million copies of her seven novels in print, she passed away. Within days, Simon and Schuster’s staff received a memo informing them that Andrews had left behind unpublished novels, as well as detailed notes and outlines for more, allowing them to publish books under her name for years to come, starting with a Flowers in the Attic prequel. Anita Diamant reached into her stable of writers and produced Andrew Neiderman, whose novel PIN had found an eager reader in Andrews. To date, Neiderman has written over sixty-eight books as V. C. Andrews.

Whether it’s the books she wrote herself or the ones ghostwritten in her name, Andrews’s books are high gothic horror, with their shock treatments and split personalities (My Sweet Audrina, 1982), child selling (Heaven, 1985), and constant incest, child abuse, and cruel parents (pretty much all of them). Like Michael McDowell, another Southern author who made his name writing paperback originals, Andrews believed that families were forces of destruction. “There are so many cries out there in the night,” she said in the same 1985 interview, conducted by Douglas E. Winter. “So much protective secrecy in families; and so many skeletons in the closets.”

Editor Ann Patty rejected every cover treatment until art director Milton Charles designed what became the iconic V.C. Andrews cover: a die-cut opening revealing a character staring out morosely. It immediately launched a die-cut cover craze. Credit 116

Andrews never phoned it in. She became her characters, crying when they cried, losing weight when they starved. “We all have primal fears of being helpless, trapped in a situation beyond our control,” she said, talking about her disease; her books were about people breaking out of their prisons, finding freedom, becoming empowered. Later in that 1985 interview, Andrews was asked if her stories were autobiographical. “I don’t want to write an autobiography,” she said. “My life isn’t finished yet.”

A year later, she was dead. And yet she lived on. Andrews revived gothic horror by making fear less of a supernatural threat and more of a family affair. It would take another woman to introduce actual monsters to the new gothic. Anne Rice and her melodramatic vampires were ready to swoop in for the kill.

The Vampire Strikes Back

From their earliest appearances in literature, vampires have been jerks. Dracula was rude and smelly Eurotrash. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla was a terrible houseguest. And the less said about Varney the Vampire, the better. Then Anne Rice came along and completely overhauled their image. Sympathetic vampires had been given starring roles before, notably in Jane Gaskell’s 1964 novel The Shiny Narrow Grin, about a going-nowhere girl who falls in love with a gloomy goth vampire, or savage and seductive Barnabas Collins in the rickety ’60s soap opera Dark Shadows. But before Anne Rice took up their cause, vampire stories were told from the point of view of the people hunting them.

Rice gave vampires a voice. And then they wouldn’t shut up. Narrated by an especially whiny Louis, Interview with the Vampire (1976) was greeted with critical disdain (“suckling eroticism” crowed the New Republic, “static…pompous…superficial” proclaimed the New York Times), which hit the author hard. Rice was writing her way out of a depression after her five-year-old daughter’s death from leukemia, and she unconsciously put all her feelings of helplessness, regret, and guilt into the book. Louis was a passive victim because that’s how Rice felt when she told his story.

Despite not finding a huge audience in hardcover, Interview with the Vampire quickly sold film and paperback rights. The sequel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), did even better in hardcover, selling around 75,000 copies. By the time the third book of the trilogy, Queen of the Damned, hit shelves in 1988, Rice had become so well known that the first printing alone was 405,000 copies.

As the series progressed and Rice’s fortunes changed, so did her vampire’s voice. Lestat wasn’t a whiner. He was a rock star. Rice, who was born Howard Allen O’Brien and once described herself as a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, said that with Lestat she was writing not about who she was, but who she wanted to be. This switch to a more proactive and fearless character not only matched where the author was in her life, but it was also a shrewd move that made the sequel a hit.

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The front and back covers for the first paperback of Interview with the Vampire (opposite) felt modern, but the 1979 paperback saw H. Tom Hall, famous for his historical romance covers, go full gothic. Credit 118