Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Andrews started writing in the early 1970s, producing what she called “confession stories” in order to “finance [her] more serious efforts,” as she wrote in a pitch letter to the literary agent Anita Diamant. Those serious efforts included the first novel she wrote, though not her first to be published, a science-fiction work called Gods of Green Mountain (published posthumously in 2004 by Pocket Books). The book is set on a distant planet that has been ravaged by two suns and endless storms, and it’s packed with typical space-opera fare such as a princess, a reckless hero, outlaws, and civil war, plus a mysterious plant that can solve the world’s problems. But Andrews’s so-called confession stories that paid the bills early in her career are more interesting. The titles alone are packed with tawdry details.

  Take, for example, “I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night,” which has become practically apocrypha for Andrews fans. It was published in a pulp magazine, but the publication details have been lost and no copies exist. Certainly the story anticipates Andrews’s most famous book: Flowers in the Attic (Simon and Schuster, 1979), which introduced the Dollanganger family, whose saga would unfold over five novels. That first book was a runaway hit right out of the gate, staying on the New York Times Best-Seller List for fourteen weeks. The sequel spent nineteen weeks on the list.

  It’s a Family Affair

  The plot of Flowers is Gothic horror in its purest form: four children—beautiful, blonde cherubs all of them—are locked in the attic of Foxworth Hall by their wealthy, abusive, emotionally frigid grandmother. The scenario is a bizarre attempt by their mother to keep her virginal reputation intact so she can secure the family fortune. The book is full of twisted relationships, especially the grandmother’s to religion, which is terrifying and the reason for the abuse that borders on torture. She can yell about sin as well as Carrie’s mother (no mention of “dirty pillows” in this book, though). But the relationship that scandalized readers the most was between the two oldest Dollanganger children, who fall in love while trapped in that lonely attic, their teenage hormones raging.

  It could be a sweet story, really, but the horror is real. The mother, who at the beginning of the novel seems to be a loving and protective caregiver, becomes a monster, willing to sacrifice her daughters for wealth. The youngest child dies. There’s also rape. And rats.

  The child incest was sufficient to get Andrews’s book banned from several libraries, but the story was popular enough to support immediate sequels, in which readers learn that the Dollanganger family had a long history of incestual romance. Andrews created other franchises that were just as juicy. The Audrina series, beginning with My Sweet Audrina (Simon & Schuster, 1982), involved another child locked away in a Gothic mansion, this one haunted by the ghostly memories of a sister who is long dead (or is she?). Andrews’s books about the Casteel family, beginning with Heaven (HarperCollins, 1985), offer more dead children, a wealthy elite who scorn the impoverished family, and a creepy doll made to look just like a dead woman.

  Andrews’s writing career was lucrative. She sold her first book to Simon & Schuster’s Pocket imprint for $7,500, and two sequels were immediately ordered, with a $50,000 advance. Heaven brought in $2 million and was part of a two-book deal. In addition to making her wealthy, Andrews’s novels served as a rite of passage for would-be Goth girls. The lure of secret incest in an old manor house is too great to resist. But Andrews’s work is more than a guilty pleasure. It’s Gothic fiction directly descended from the lineage of Anne Radcliffe. Her work is melodramatic, yes, but it’s also packed with compelling characters, especially women, caught up in villainous schemes.

  Unfortunately, Andrews could not keep up with her growing career. Her already fragile health declined, and she was in constant pain. While writing Heaven and its sequel, which were her final books, she discovered a lump in her breast that turned out to be cancer. She didn’t want to seek medical treatment until the books were finished, by which time the illness had spread to other parts of her body.

  After Andrews passed away in 1986, her estate kept her literary legacy alive through a ghostwriter. Andrew Neiderman stepped in to pen mass-market paperbacks under her name, using some of her unfinished outlines as inspiration. Her novels continue to sell well decades after her death. Some readers speculate whether her salacious plots have a basis in her life. Maybe her early “confession stories” have something to do with that rumor.

  HALLMARK MOMENTS

  Newcomers to V. C. Andrews’s novels can expect the following elements:

  • The drinking of blood. In Flowers in the Attic, food becomes scarce and so the children turn to feeding on the blood of the oldest brother.

  • Incest. The most famous example is between the blonde cherublike siblings in Flowers in the Attic. But Andrews’s work also depicts problematic scenes in which consent is neglected.

  • Child torture and slavery. Children don’t fare well in Andrews’s novels; they’re often drugged, poisoned, tarred (yes, you read that right), and sometimes sold for moonshine money. Who are these parents?

  • A tiger mauling a kid. In the United States of America. We don’t need to say more about this, do we?

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: If Flowers in the Attic leaves you wanting additional melodramatic horror, read the rest of the Dollanganger series. The subsequent books feature possession by the spirits of dead relatives and, perhaps more disturbingly, one of the children becoming a televangelist.

  Also try: My Sweet Audrina features a classic 1970s keyhole cover (in which a portion of the cover is cut out, revealing an elaborate illustration underneath); the original paperback is worth tracking down for that alone, never mind the story’s sweet twist ending. Flowers in the Attic has been adapted for the screen several times; the 1987 version, starring Kristy Swanson (the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as the oldest sister Cathy, has a strong fandom, although it gets some of the book’s key details wrong and nearly erases the incest, leaving only a few longing looks. In 2014, Lifetime made a television version starring Ellen Burstyn as the grandmother and Kiernan Shipka (of Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) as Cathy. Although not perfect, this version is a closer adaptation and plays up the book’s Gothic and horror aspects.

  Related work: Andrews fans may also like the work of Lois Duncan, who wrote young adult horror and thrillers. Duncan’s work never deals with sex or incest in quite the same way that Andrews’s does, but Duncan does push boundaries. In Killing Mr. Griffin (Little, Brown, 1978), a group of teenagers accidentally kills one of their high school teachers. Similarly, high school friends find themselves hiding a murder—and running from a murderer—in I Know What You Did Last Summer (Little, Brown, 1973), which was made into a well-known movie in 1997. Duncan’s Gothic horror novel is Down a Dark Hall (Little, Brown, 1974).

  Kafka of the Weird

  Kathe Koja

  1960–

  In 1991 Dell Publishing debuted the Abyss Books imprint with The Cipher by the Detroit-born author Kathe Koja. The novel, Koja’s first, is about a black hole in a basement floor, which the book’s two main characters dub the “Funhole.” Things that are dropped into the hole—including a live mouse—come back changed, rearranged. The plot is as bizarre and wonderful and horrifying as that premise suggests, and the novel’s release immediately cemented Koja as a horror creator to watch.

  Koja’s writing has a strange, indefinable quality that’s hard to categorize; in the introduction to his 2012 interview with Koja for Weird Fiction Review, Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach series, aptly called her work “Kafkaesque.” Take, for example, her description of the Funhole:

  “Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black…. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some—pr
ocess.”

  Koja’s diction is precise and uncomfortable; her tone is often irreverent and confrontational. Not unlike the Funhole, Koja’s writing style has a way of pulling you in completely and not letting go until “The End.”

  The Cipher garnered copious praise from critics. It won a Bram Stoker Award and a Locus Award, both for best first novel. It was also nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award. A year after its release, Koja published her second novel, Bad Brains, again with Abyss, which is just as strange as her first. It features an artist who, when his wife divorces him, becomes too depressed to create new work. That’s only the start, of course. He then suffers a head injury that leads to hallucinations and other schizophrenic-like behavior. A nightmarish road trip follows.

  Koja quickly followed up with a string of other books: Skin (Dell, 1993), Strange Angels (Bantam, 1994), Kink (Henry Holt, 1996), and Extremities (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998). Her writing was the voice of ’90s horror—raw, edgy, and any other adjective you’d expect to hear ascribed to a rock star. In Skin, for example, the main character is a metal-welding artist who discovers an underground art group that uses body horror as art, displayed on a Grand Guignol–style stage. The book features plenty of blood, mutilation, cutting, pain, and sadomasochism.

  Exploring the Edges

  For all the inventively grisly imagery, Koja’s writing earned plenty of praise from critics. In a review of Skin, Kirkus Reviews compared it to William Burroughs. Publishers Weekly likened some of Koja’s short stories in her 1998 collection Extremities to Edgar Allan Poe. Like her Skin protagonist, Koja pushes the boundaries of fiction, taking her audience along with her characters to an uncomfortable place. Those uncomfortable places are where her talent shines.

  In 2002, Koja wrote her first book for a young adult audience, Stray-dog (Speak). The plot follows Rachel, a loner, who finds friendship with a feral dog whom she names Grrl. The novel is told from the dog’s point of view, detailing a harsh life on the streets, and at times it is dark. But the novel offers hope about the possibility of finding friendship in the unlikeliest of places. Six more books followed.

  In an interview for Macmillan’s website, Koja discussed writing for young adults: “Many of the characters I love best in fiction—Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet, J. D. Salinger’s Holden and Franny and Zooey, Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby—are people who struggle with hard ideas, say what they think, show their bewilderments, love with all their hearts. They are exasperating, funny, intense people. Young people.”

  Koja’s husband, the illustrator Rick Lieder, has designed covers for several of her novels, which play up the artistic nature of her many loner, creative-type characters. Koja’s own creative work extends beyond her books; she formed Nerve, an “immersive performance group,” which credits her as writer and director. She still lives—and writes—in Detroit, and we’re always excited to see what she’s come up with next.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: If you read one Kathe Koja book, make it The Cipher.

  Also try: In 2010, Koja published Under the Poppy (Small Beer Press), a historical novel that tells the story of two brothel-owning friends, Decca and Rupert. Decca loves Rupert, but Rupert loves Decca’s brother, who disrupts Decca’s life when he returns to town with his traveling puppet theater. Koja’s love for performance and the artistry of the theater shines brightly in this novel. The book took the title of best novel at the 2011 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, which honor queer-positive work in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

  Related work: Koja has referred to Shirley Jackson as one of her primary literary influences. Jackson certainly shared Koja’s affinity for nightmarish journeys and characters who exist just outside of normal society. For companion pieces to Koja, try Shirley Jackson’s short stories “The Bus,” “Charles,” and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.”

  Adversary for the Devil

  Lisa Tuttle

  1952–

  George R. R. Martin is famous for creating an entire kingdom with a vast mythology in his Song of Ice and Fire saga. But before the dragons and incestuous romance, Martin collaborated with Lisa Tuttle, a feminist voice in the world of science fiction and horror.

  Born in Houston, Texas, but based in the United Kingdom since 1981, Tuttle is a writer whose creative output spans continents and genres. Although she leans toward horror, she has published science fiction and fantasy, always with a dash of feminism, and many of her stories feature complex female characters. She began her career in short fiction; her first published work was the short story “Stranger in the House” (published in the anthology Clarion II in 1972). She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1974. She wrote her first novel, Windhaven (Timescape Books, 1981), with Martin. The novel was nominated for a Locus Award.

  In a 2015 interview with the writer Angela Slatter for her website, Tuttle said, “I can’t actually remember a time when I didn’t want to write, as well as read, stories.” This is not surprising coming from an author who has written over fifteen novels, a series of children’s books, several short story collections as well as numerous uncollected short stories, and four works of nonfiction, including the Encyclopedia of Feminism (Facts on File, 1986) and the more recent Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction (A & C Black, 2002). When Slatter asked if she feels at home in the horror genre, Tuttle expressed unease with being boxed in, but admitted, “I have always been drawn to the weird, the strange and the supernatural in fiction. That is certainly my natural territory.”

  This affinity for the weird is evident in her story “The Dream Detective,” which appeared in March 2013 in Lightspeed magazine. In an interview published with the story, Tuttle cited Sax Rohmer’s 1920 story collection The Dream Detective, Being Some Account of the Methods of Moris Klaw (A. L. Burt) as having sparked an idea about the uncanny and dreams. Rohmer is famous, or perhaps infamous, for having created the villainous and racially insensitive character Fu Manchu. He also tried his pen at occult detective fiction, which was all the rage at the beginning of the twentieth century. His eccentric character Moris Klaw believed that violent criminal actions left behind palpable thought and emotional residues, and, in essence, he solves crimes by taking a nap at the scene. While he dozes, residual psychic impressions from the crime affect his dreams, and he wakes up with the solution.

  Tuttle admitted to not remembering much about Rohmer’s book other than the title, which she borrowed for her story. Her other inspiration was a dream in which she committed a crime and got away with it, which deeply affected her. To avoid spoilers, we will simply say that “The Dream Detective” is an unsettling read with an appropriately weird, slow build-up. The story’s narrator is told by his dinner date that she’s a dream detective who solves crimes committed in dreams. The narrator is shocked and becomes defensive. (We wonder why.)

  Strange Familiar

  After Windhaven, Tuttle wrote the horror novel Familiar Spirit, published in 1983 by Tor. A young woman, Sarah, moves into a new home that happens to be inhabited by an angry demonic spirit that wants to possess her soul. What’s a girl to do?

  Familiar Spirit could easily be just another demon-possesses-girl story, but Tuttle’s interesting choices make the novel feel fresh. For one thing, she avoids casting as her main character a young waif who is helpless to battle the demon until a priest shows up to tie her down and fight the spirit for control of her body. A male priest (or father figure) fighting the (usually male) demon for control of a woman’s body is patriarchy at its worst, and Tuttle, a feminist, wants no part of it.

  Instead, Tuttle creates a protagonist who’s a worthy adversary. Sarah is level-headed and smart. She makes a plan to vanquish the demon because she can, and she feels a sense of duty and responsibility to banish it from her home.

  Feminist politics aside, in Familiar Spirit Tuttle has written a flat-out good horror story. She’s a superior storyteller. And i
f you think the title is a reference to a cat, as in a witch’s familiar, you won’t be surprised to find cats in this story. And demons. And one killer toad.

  Tuttle’s other books blend genres and incorporate horror with psychological suspense and dark fantasy. The Pillow Friend (White Wolf Games Studio, 1996; later edition from Spectra in 2005) blurs the boundaries between dreams and reality, as a young woman encounters a strange porcelain doll, her “pillow friend,” who offers wonderful dreams that come at a cost. It’s every bit as eerie and uncomfortable as you might imagine. Gabriel (Tom Doherty, 1988) also mingles horror with weirdness. A woman returns to the city where her husband had died shortly having a threesome with her and another woman. Now, the other woman is back—with a young boy in tow, who claims to be the reincarnation of his dead father. And that’s just the beginning.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: The out-of-print Familiar Spirit should be your first Lisa Tuttle book if you can find a used copy. In 2018, Penguin Random House released a graphic novel adaptation of Windhaven, Tuttle’s collaboration with George R. R. Martin. Tuttle cowrote the adaptation, and the book is gorgeously illustrated by Elsa Charretier of Marvel Comics.

  Also try: In her novel The Mysteries (Bantam, 2005), Tuttle dips her pen into the well of the weird detective. Ian is a private investigator who specializes in finding missing people (his own father mysteriously vanished when Ian was just a boy). He’s tasked with finding a young woman named Per, a search that leads him to the Scottish Highlands and a world where Celtic mythology might be more fact than fiction.