Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century.

Even though two of the three great novels of the ’70s horror boom featured female main characters (Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist), V. C. Andrews was the first female brand-name horror writer, capable of selling millions of books simply because her name was on the cover. It’s no accident that her style of horror was the one originally popularized by women: the gothic. Gothic horror was domestic horror in which affairs of the heart were as important as affairs of the flesh. Its subject matter was families, marriage, houses, children, insanity, and secrets.

The sexual revolution of the ’60s encouraged a new frankness about sex, and movies like 1972’s Deep Throat made the depiction of raw sex no big deal. When the Playboy Channel debuted on cable in 1982, it was greeted with a shrug. The culture was ready for a romantic backlash.

In the ’80s, everyone was either in therapy or on talk shows talking about their terrible childhoods. Horror had returned to the shadowy bedrooms of the family home. It was up to Andrews to show us that families could house, and create, monsters.

Return of the Repressed

Like an unstoppable zombie, the literary career of V. C. Andrews cannot be destroyed. Put her in a wheelchair, throw her down the stairs, stick her in a coffin, it doesn’t matter. Because every year since 1979 there has been a new book on the stands from V. C. Andrews. Some years there have been six.

Cleo Virginia Andrews was definitely not the frail, shut-in, gothic grandma that People portrayed her as in her very first interview in 1980. The magazine committed the cardinal sins of revealing her age (Andrews was in her late fifties when she published Flowers in the Attic) and photographing her wheelchair (“I refuse to allow pictures of me sitting in that thing,” she later wrote), but she seemed most appalled by being portrayed as a victim. Andrews was nobody’s victim.

At age 15, a fall down stairs at her high school exacerbated Andrews’s back problems. A series of failed interventions left her spine unable to bend and confined her to a wheelchair. She had always wanted to be an actress; instead, her mother became her caretaker for the rest of her life (yet in all that time never managed to read a single one of her daughter’s books). After her father died in 1957, Andrews supported the family by playing the stock market and becoming a commercial artist for magazines and department stores.

In 1972 she began to write, publishing stories with titles like “I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night” in true-confession rags, but her fiction didn’t sell until she confronted her fears. “I’m writing around all of the difficult things that my mother would disapprove of,” she said in a 1985 interview. “So once I brushed her off my shoulder and got gutsy enough, I sold.” She got her guts in 1979. The story of the Dollanganger children, locked away by their mother, poisoned by their grandmother, and falling in love with each other, became Flowers in the Attic. Agent Anita Diamant represented the paperback original and her assistant sold it for $7,500 to editor Ann Patty at Pocket Books. Patty’s assessment of the writing was “it may be awful, but it is a style”—she was smart enough to see that it elicited a rabid reaction among female readers. Pushing for a big marketing campaign, Patty opted for the gender-neutral name V. C. Andrews (something the author didn’t discover until she saw the cover), sending the book onto the New York Times Best-Seller List for fourteen weeks.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986, Andrews hid her condition as long as she could; in December of that year, with 24 million copies of her seven novels in print, she passed away. Within days, Simon and Schuster’s staff received a memo informing them that Andrews had left behind unpublished novels, as well as detailed notes and outlines for more, allowing them to publish books under her name for years to come, starting with a Flowers in the Attic prequel. Anita Diamant reached into her stable of writers and produced Andrew Neiderman, whose novel PIN had found an eager reader in Andrews. To date, Neiderman has written over sixty-eight books as V. C. Andrews.

Whether it’s the books she wrote herself or the ones ghostwritten in her name, Andrews’s books are high gothic horror, with their shock treatments and split personalities (My Sweet Audrina, 1982), child selling (Heaven, 1985), and constant incest, child abuse, and cruel parents (pretty much all of them). Like Michael McDowell, another Southern author who made his name writing paperback originals, Andrews believed that families were forces of destruction. “There are so many cries out there in the night,” she said in the same 1985 interview, conducted by Douglas E. Winter. “So much protective secrecy in families; and so many skeletons in the closets.”

Editor Ann Patty rejected every cover treatment until art director Milton Charles designed what became the iconic V.C. Andrews cover: a die-cut opening revealing a character staring out morosely. It immediately launched a die-cut cover craze. Credit 116

Andrews never phoned it in. She became her characters, crying when they cried, losing weight when they starved. “We all have primal fears of being helpless, trapped in a situation beyond our control,” she said, talking about her disease; her books were about people breaking out of their prisons, finding freedom, becoming empowered. Later in that 1985 interview, Andrews was asked if her stories were autobiographical. “I don’t want to write an autobiography,” she said. “My life isn’t finished yet.”

A year later, she was dead. And yet she lived on. Andrews revived gothic horror by making fear less of a supernatural threat and more of a family affair. It would take another woman to introduce actual monsters to the new gothic. Anne Rice and her melodramatic vampires were ready to swoop in for the kill.

The Vampire Strikes Back

From their earliest appearances in literature, vampires have been jerks. Dracula was rude and smelly Eurotrash. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla was a terrible houseguest. And the less said about Varney the Vampire, the better. Then Anne Rice came along and completely overhauled their image. Sympathetic vampires had been given starring roles before, notably in Jane Gaskell’s 1964 novel The Shiny Narrow Grin, about a going-nowhere girl who falls in love with a gloomy goth vampire, or savage and seductive Barnabas Collins in the rickety ’60s soap opera Dark Shadows. But before Anne Rice took up their cause, vampire stories were told from the point of view of the people hunting them.

Rice gave vampires a voice. And then they wouldn’t shut up. Narrated by an especially whiny Louis, Interview with the Vampire (1976) was greeted with critical disdain (“suckling eroticism” crowed the New Republic, “static…pompous…superficial” proclaimed the New York Times), which hit the author hard. Rice was writing her way out of a depression after her five-year-old daughter’s death from leukemia, and she unconsciously put all her feelings of helplessness, regret, and guilt into the book. Louis was a passive victim because that’s how Rice felt when she told his story.

Despite not finding a huge audience in hardcover, Interview with the Vampire quickly sold film and paperback rights. The sequel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), did even better in hardcover, selling around 75,000 copies. By the time the third book of the trilogy, Queen of the Damned, hit shelves in 1988, Rice had become so well known that the first printing alone was 405,000 copies.

As the series progressed and Rice’s fortunes changed, so did her vampire’s voice. Lestat wasn’t a whiner. He was a rock star. Rice, who was born Howard Allen O’Brien and once described herself as a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, said that with Lestat she was writing not about who she was, but who she wanted to be. This switch to a more proactive and fearless character not only matched where the author was in her life, but it was also a shrewd move that made the sequel a hit.

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The front and back covers for the first paperback of Interview with the Vampire (opposite) felt modern, but the 1979 paperback saw H. Tom Hall, famous for his historical romance covers, go full gothic. Credit 118

Rice’s vampire trilogy is transparently autobiographical, allowing her to work through death, guilt, fear, and insecurity, emerging at the end as a fabulous superstar. Similarly, her vampires didn’t bring stench and disease like their literary predecessors; they brought beauty and culture. They were romantic gods, and nothing as tacky as a cross or a stake through the heart could kill them. Only sunlight and fire were dramatic enough to take them down.

A Bloody Legacy

Anne Rice’s vampires marked a significant transition for horror heroes. Before, the protagonists of horror fiction were blue-collar guys: Vietnam vets and salt of the earth types who staked first and asked questions later (if at all). Rice’s vampires were cultured and elegant, powerful and refined, slim hipped and long haired and given to velvet cloaks.

And they loved to talk. Before Rice’s books, vampires didn’t have much to say beyond “slurp,” but her stories are told from the undead’s point of view, using the language of confessional magazines and talk therapy. Rice’s vampires chat about their victimization, alienation, loneliness and suffering, because by talking through their feelings they can come to terms with them, and by coming to terms with them they can conquer them. These vampires cannot be monstrous or “other” because we hear their voices, and nothing that speaks to us about heartbreak, or pretty clothes, can truly be alien.

But the difference between the minor success of Interview with a Vampire and the mega success of Lestat and Queen is hard to account for. Anne Rice didn’t change how she wrote about vampires between 1976 and 1988; something bigger was going on in society. In Dracula, Renfield proclaimed, “The blood is the life!” By the time Rice published Lestat, the equation was blood = death.

Rarely has a disease engendered such fear and loathing as HIV. The term AIDS was first used in 1982, and by 1985 hundreds of parents would pull their children out of school based on rumors that an infected student might attend. Politicians proclaimed that children could “catch” the infection from a sneeze or a water fountain. Families abandoned the corpses of their dead sons in hospitals. The illness posited a future where human contact would be rare, bodily fluids poisonous.

Into the midst of this panic swooped Rice’s vampires, sexy and shimmering. Swapping blood was all the high they craved, and they humanized the notion of the other. Everything our parents were telling us was wrong: these vampires were scary but seductive, dangerous but delightful. Becoming one of them was described as receiving their “Dark Gift,” and the transfusion made them not only permanently stoned, but, as Lestat said, “more fully what we are.” You would become more fully yourself. And your real self was fabulous.

As vampires got chatty and romantic, even Dracula became a hero, both in John Shirley’s first novel and in Fred Saberhagen’s 10-volume series. Credit 119

Alienated, lonely, brooding, gothic, glam, good dancers—Rice’s vampires were everything we wanted to be. Other writers explored the possibilities, including Fred Saberhagen, who made the once-monstrous Dracula the hero of his novels. In John Shirley’s Dracula in Love (1979) that old Transylvania hillbilly was an inhuman fiend wielding a prehensile penis with glowing eyes, but he could still be tamed. In true sensitive-male fashion, he only had to meet the right lady. Halfway through the book, he falls in love with a woman who saves his life. At the climax it’s revealed that she is the living embodiment of Mother Earth and Dracula goes to her, crawling up inside her cavernous vagina while glowing like a 100-watt light bulb. Before Anne Rice, vampires killed humans. Now they got in touch with their sensitive sides while muffin-spelunking inside of them. They aren’t predators, they are, literally, a part of us.

The old-fashioned Vietnam vet, plus ’Salem’s Lot, still couldn’t create a formula capable of defeating emo vampires. Credit 120

Vampires in modern horror fiction became a powerful metaphor for our attitudes toward outsiders and the AIDS epidemic—except for Nightblood (1990), which was for people who thought ’Salem’s Lot needed more machine guns. Its protagonist, Chris Stiles, is a Vietnam vet and the ultimate divorced dad, constantly disappearing at crucial moments, leaving his woman and adopted children in peril, then reappearing at the last second with his silenced Uzi to save the day. Nightblood is so hardcore, you grow hair on your palms as you read. And it ends the only way possible: by giving Stiles a leather trench coat and a katana and reassuring us that he will continue to kill vampires forever.