...and the last on V.C.

I don’t want you people to think I’m obsessed or anything, but it occurs to me that you might think I’m a little warped, what with urging nice, upstanding citizens to read Flowers in the Attic and give it to minors. Especially when it’s such crap. But here’s the thing. I want people to read it, and read it gleefully, because it is such crap.

The glory of V.C. Andrews – and I speak here only of the early titles, which were really written by someone who at least went by that name and wrote the books, not some sad wreck of a ghost-writer who has to work in that voice, god help him – is that the books are written in truly poor form. The way I always think about it is, This is a woman who wrote books using the word “for” instead of “because” over and over and fucking OVER again because she really thought it sounded classier and more writerly. Even though no one, I mean, NO one, would use “for” that way in real life. I mean, you read the Dollanganger books (Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, and If There Be Thorns are the essential three; there are more in the series, but I don’t really count them) and they are just chockablock with speech patterns that are not native to anywhere except Andrews’ addled head. I mean, the dialogue in this book is crazy. But just the narrator’s voice – a girl named Cathy – is completely artificial. It goes beyond the beyond, and – if you are in the right mood, the right frame of mind, and the right age when you read it – there’s just nothing better. It’s candy, I tell you, cotton candy, in printed form. It’s dotted swiss lace made with sleazy gold polyester thread.

The plots are beyond comprehension; the names of the characters are laughable. To be honest, there’s nothing genuinely good about these things. But that is their charm.

I find myself wondering if any boys have ever read these things, and I have to say, the only boys I know who have read them are now gay men. If you catch your twelve year old son reading a V.C. Andrews book, then you know what end is up. It’s not required reading for boys. But I stand by my word, for girls, this is just essential.

Apparently Ms. Andrews died of breast cancer in 1986, and her last novel (which was the last of the Dollanganger series) was actually finished by her ghostwriter, Andrew Niederman. I once tried to read one of the later (Niederman-penned) Andrews books when I found it in the coffee break room at an office I was working in; it was devoid of the perverse charms that Ms. Andrews supplied with such florid ease. There’s clearly a cult built around the Dollanganger books, but I’m not sure I’d want to attend a meeting of its members… I think it might get a little too weird, even for Miss Edith. Though I am confident, confident, that the mint juleps served there would be excellent…