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.
On the rare occasions when reviewers have been compelled, presumably by cruel editors, to write about the books, they concur: V. C. Andrews isn’t just bad, she is beneath contempt. “Flowers… is deranged swill,” a Washington Post reviewer opined in 1979. In a 1982 New York Times “Fiction in Brief” column that includes reviews of potboilers like Danielle Steel’s Crossings and Shirley Conran’s Lace, the most venomous is reserved for My Sweet Audrina, Andrews’s strangest book and her only stand-alone.
The reviewer claims she’s unable even to follow the story line, then asserts that she not only doesn’t understand the book, she doesn’t want to. “The story begins when the second Audrina, the narrator, is about 7 but since she isn’t allowed to go to school and is regularly told she has no memory, who knows?” she writes. “Who cares is another question.… Damian and Ellsbeth become lovers again. Ellsbeth dies. Does a sensible reader really want to know more?”
More recently, in 2001, Zoe Williams, writing in the Guardian, dismisses Andrews’s writing as stunted ramblings that read as if “done by computer, with a built-in Teetering On The Brink Of Womanhood template.”
The passage of thirty years, and the devotion of millions of young women, hasn’t helped Andrews’s reception at all (although, to be fair, the devotion of millions of young women has rarely helped any artist’s reputation much). In the first glow of Flowers’s success, when Andrews was at least mentioned in industry news reports, she was often cited in the same breath as up-and-coming horror writer Stephen King. But while King has gone on to respectability and full-page reviews in the New York Times, V. C. Andrews is still the same shunned “trash” novelist. And while horror, mystery, and science fiction have earned some respectability from a blurred high/low division in pop culture, Andrews’s books are pretty much just where the Times reviewer left them in 1982. The sensible reader does not want to know more.
If we were less sensible, and did want to know more, what would we see? Maybe that Andrews picked up on something that was swirling around her, a dark side of the 1970s we still haven’t looked at very clearly and whose shadows still cling to us. Maybe we would discover that her books actually contain a taloned commentary on the Freudian family romance, the process by which children escape their parents’ erotic hold by fantasizing that they are the abandoned offspring of a noble family (or, in the case of Flowers, the cast-aside product of an incestuous marriage). Certainly we find in Andrews’s books a more disturbing look at the secret lives of girls. In a 2004 article in this magazine, Amy Benfer writes of the gauzy pleasures of the Sweet Valley High novels, their pastel covers offering “the most satisfying form of pornography I had.” When we look at Andrews, however, we see an astoundingly sinister view of girls’ sexuality that yokes punishment and desire. Both Sweet Valley High and Flowers feature twins prominently—and it is hard not to see a dark joke in the name Andrews gives her twins, Dollanganger, as if they are the dark doppelgängers of every teen twin-tale to come before, or after. But while the Sweet Valley High books reassure teen readers with creamy covers and tales of malls and school rivalries, the Flowersseries offers up a saga of sin, terror, and revenge, the dark covers featuring a keyhole, beckoning us in. In reckoning with our pleasure in her books, then, we must examine our own drive to see our darkest desires and shame writ large again and again. We might even have to revisit our own personal tales of abuse, and our feeble attempts to lock trauma up and throw away the key. Most of all, if we weren’t so sensible, we would see a full flowering of adolescent-girl rage.
Dark Family — V. C. ANDREWS AND THE SECRET LIFE OF GIRLS by Megan Abbott
