Andrew Neiderman Puts a PIN in It
Your children want to know where babies come from, so you:
a) give them a talk about the birds and the bees
b) buy them a book called Your Changing Body
c) show them a tasteful PBS documentary
d) use ventriloquism to make them think your transparent, life-size anatomical dummy is alive and capable of answering all their questions about human reproduction.
If you picked (D), then the storyline of PIN (1981) won’t seem so strange. Leon and Ursula have lived together ever since their parents died in a car accident. The kids grew up thinking dad’s anatomical model, PIN, was alive, and now Leon throws his voice unconsciously, keeping PIN talking. PIN eats with them, listens to Leon’s weird poetry recitals, and when Leon and Ursula have incest sex, PIN likes to help. If you’re a completely insane lunatic shut-in with ice water in your veins and screaming bats inside your skull, this would be paradise. And for Leon, it is.
Leon and Ursula are so hyperintelligent that they’re basically insane, and that’s Andrew Neiderman’s specialty: characters who are too smart for their own good. In Night Howl (1986), it’s a genetically mutated dog with a man-sized brain. In Teacher’s Pet (1986), it’s an afterschool tutor who turns the brightest kids into cold-blooded “rational” monsters. In Brainchild (1981), it’s Lois Gilbert, high school senior, who turns her house into a behavioral psychology experiment that drives her entire family stark raving mad.
When Neiderman’s not writing about mad scientists in training, he loves writing about families who put the “fun” in dysfunction. Maybe it’s his way with toxic families that led to the other part of his career. While he’s written forty-seven novels under his own name, he’s written sixty-eight as V. C. Andrews, ghost-writing for the woman who raised gothic horror from its grave.
In Andrew Neiderman’s books, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own neurotic, homicidal, totally psychotic, and sexually dysfunctional way. Credit 114