You may have heard the phrase “body horror” used to describe a genre focused on producing terror and disgust by doing gruesome things to bodies. A lot of V.C. Andrews’s work falls into this category. Physical discomfort is a huge part of her work. There's a lot of painful childbirth and missed meals. And who can forget the scene in Flowers in the Attic when Cathy wakes up to find her grandmother has covered her…
When I look at some of the fiction I’ve written, it’s not really surprising that as a young girl, I was obsessed with V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic. Wealth! Children! An attic turned into a playground! Evil grandmother and eviler mother! Incest! I still cannot eat powdered donuts and am very suspicious of all white powdery substances. I wore my paperback copy of Flowers in the Attic out. I still have it; the spine…
This piece came about in a strange-ish way, as they so often do. I had fallen down a Wiki hole of truly epic proportions, having stumbled upon the fifty most interesting Wikipedia articles and fifty more. STOP. I know what you're going to do, and how much time it's going to take. Please just open two tabs and dump those links in and come back, or I'll never see you again. And I…
The setup: V.C. Andrews’ controversial bestselling book, Flowers in the Attic, is getting a TV movie adaptation at Lifetime. The cable network has greenlighted the film, which will star Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn. Flowers In The Attic weaves the gothic tale of four young siblings, two boys and two girls, who, after the tragic death of their father, are torn from an idyllic life and subjected to cruel emotional and physical abuse resulting from a dark, long-hidden family secret. Abandoned by…
"I never watched horror movies as a little kid. Once my wife and I started dating, I found out that she had LOVED horror movies from pretty much the moment she saw her first one. After we moved moved in together, we often did all-day movie marathons. There was a cheap, crummy non-chain video store nearby, and you could get old movies for about a dollar. So we'd go through the horror section, her excitedly…
I was twelve years old and three books into the Dollanganger quartet when I discovered that the author—who was still “writing” new books, as she continues doing to this day—had died four years earlier. Already a committed V.C. Andrews fan for life, I took this as such a personal tragedy that when our Hebrew school class was encouraged to donate a tree in Israel in memory of someone we’d loved and lost, I proudly inscribed…
In the spring of 1978, I landed a job as a senior editor at Pocket Books, though I was hardly qualified for the position. The publisher at the time, Peter Mayer, was committed to hiring bright young people on the cheap. Though I’d never before acquired a book, I was now able to acquire not only hardcover reprints but also paperback originals. Flowers in the Attic was my first.
As Mallory announced on Thursday, today will be devoted to the study and discussion of V.C. Andrews, the author of Flowers in the Attic. For those of you who aren't terrifyingly and intimately familiar with her work, Andrews was, for a time, the Stephen King of incest. You can't begin to imagine the level of success she reached in her lifetime. Whatever number of books you think are required to move in order to…
