Source: Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley Books, 1985

DO WOMEN WRITE HORROR FICTION?

Check the shelves at the local bookseller and you'll find that the modern horror novel is seemingly the enclave of the male writer. Despite a rich tradition of influential women writers -- Mary Shelly, Ann Radcliffe, and Shirley Jackson perhaps most prominent among them -- the horror story today, has but a handful of women among it's proponents.

There is Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who has successfully mingled the macabre with richly detailed historical fiction. There is Tanith Lee, whose writing is packaged, most often correctly, as fantasy. There is Marilyn Harris. Kathryn Ptacek. Lisa Tuttle. Bari Wood. The occasionally horrific psychological suspense novels of Mary Higgins Clark and Ruth Rendell. The brilliant, but apparently one-time ventures into the field by Anne Rice in Interview with the Vampire (1976), Anne Rivers Siddons in The House Next Door (1978), and Suzy McKee Charnas in The Vampire Tapestry (1980).

And then there is Virginia Andrews.

She is the best-selling woman writer identified with the field of horror; indeed, she has been called the "fastest-selling" writer of any kind of fiction in this decade; more than twenty million copies of her books have seen print since her first novel, Flowers in the Attic, appeared in 1979. Her novels, a mingling of adult fairy tale and psychological terror, fall into no currently existing genre, earning the label of "horror" more by default then by design. She is best known for her series of books about the Dollangangers, four blond and beautiful children who are locked away in an attic for years by their mother so that she can obtain an inheritance. Begun with Flowers in the Attic, the series includes Petals on the Wind (1980), If There Be Thorns (1981), and Seeds of Yesterday (1984); it is animated by nightmarish passion of greed, cruelty, and incest, yet is told in a romantic, fairy-tale tones, producing some of the most highly individualistic tales terror of this generation.

V.C. Andrews lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, her large contemporary home hidden in a wooded cul-de-sac on Lynnhaven Bay, comfortably distant from the town's tacky beachside strips of motels and souvenir shops. Her mother, who lives with her, greets me at the door and ushers me through a stylishly appointed living room to an enclosed porch overlooking the bay. There, Andrews offers me a wary smile; she does not like interviews, but she has consented to this opportunity to tell her story in her own words, without the embellishments of personality journalism that she believes have distorted other reports.

"The first interview I ever had was with People magazine. And they told me, quite frankly, that they come to get dirt. They ask all of your friends and everybody they can find, 'Tell us the dirt about V.C. Andrews.' And when they don't find any, they make up things. For instance, I wouldn't tell her my age. So she went around and found somebody who told them I was older then I was. I said, 'You must have found an enemy'. And the reporter said, 'What are you trying to hide?' "

Andrews likes to call her birthdate "a big mystery," though she knows full well that the matter could be gleaned from public records. "But perhaps," she laughs, "I was never born." The matter is not one of conceit, she explains. She loathes the notion of being judged on such simplistic facts as date of birth:

"I get older and younger as I want. It bothers me people dig so much into your life for all the wrong reasons. When I was young, I made some new friends and they liked me a lot. They asked me my age, and when I said nineteen, they seemed disappointed I wasn't sixteen. I decided then that I was never going to tell my age again. People judge you by your age -- if you're young, you're immature or impulsive, and if you're old, you must be senile and dotty."

She particularly resist the notion of viewing her novels as autobiographical. The predispositions of interviewers and reporters, she says, have been consistently literal:

"They see me as an abused child who has really suffered. They feel sorry for me, terribly sorry that I have gone though this awful abuse and was then locked away. A lot of them say, 'Don't be ashamed that you are in love with your brother.' All of these kinds of things."

What do they feel when her mother greets them at the door?

"Shock. How could such a sweet lady do all of those awful things?"

Her childhood years, spent in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Rochester, New York, were, if anything, too mundane. Born Portsmouth, she is one of three children. Her father was a career navy man, but he retired to a tool-and-die business after her mother demanded that he settle down and support the family.

"I didn't have a terrible childhood. The most terrible things about my childhood probably were those that I created my mind because my childhood was so ordinary, and I wanted it to be more exciting. But it wasn't exciting. A lot of people think I was tortured, but my parents didn't do anything. They didn't beat me. They didn't whip me. They didn't lock me away. I didn't even go hungry. And I had a lot of pretty clothes.

"I don't know how I suffered, except that I wanted a life much more adventuresome, and I didn't think it was, so I used to play exciting games with my friends. They told me I was the best instigator of the plots for our games."

She found much of her excitement in reading:

"I read everything. I read the Bible when I was seven. I didn't really know what it was about, but you kind of glean something from it. I think I read every book in the school library, including adult books. I would read my father's books. I would read anybody's books. I read books that were way beyond my years and I didn't know what the words meant. And I would go ask my mother, 'What is a harlot?' and she would say, ‘Look it up in the dictionary.'

"I found girls' books dull. I liked boys' books better -- Alexander Dumas, adventure stories. I loved science fiction and fantasy. I loved the fairy tales. But there is an element of horror in fairy tales, so that when I would go through the woods, I was always looking for something -- a witch, an ogre, something scary -- and it was never there, and that was a little bit disappointing. I didn't want a real horror, liked a rapist or a murderer, but I wanted a fairy-tale horror.

"I read Edgar Allan Poe and was absolutely fascinated with him -- I can't read him today, he's too dull. But at the time, I adored Poe because he gave me the chills, made me shudder. I liked Frankenstein. My uncle bought me the first edition of Dracula when I was 12, and he said, 'Now this is valuable. Keep it and treasure it.' That book scared me so much I would put it in the closet and cover it up, and I would put a little piece of garlic at my windows. I even bought a crucifix to keep Dracula away from me."

She wrote stories at any early age, winning a scholarship at fifteen for a parody of Tennyson's Idylls of the King. "I was as creative in the rough. If I didn't have anything to read, or if I wasn't able to sleep, I would make up stories. I made up stories as I walked to school and back. I was never me in these stories. I was a princess or somebody else, living out all sorts of adventures until I got to school."

But her creative impulses were channeled into art rather than writing. "I was a child prodigy in art. You know how, in school, you are asked to draw representations of your family and home? Well, most kids draw a house straight on, and put mommy and daddy and brother and me right in a row. Well, we had a house that had an interesting design, and I knew you couldn't see it if I did it head on, so I drew it three quarters and in perspective. And my people had necks and arms and waists. The teachers were stunned, because seven-year-olds don't know how to see in perspective and how to go toward a vanishing point. They began to send me to junior college art classes when I was seven. I would sit on a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary so I could see over these huge desks. I think my nose just used to clear the desk. And I would draw with all these great big kids.

"Art was just something that I did so naturally. I used to draw on all my books; I illustrated everything that I read. Even when I had library books, I would deface them like that; I thought that the readers would appreciate it. I used to color the black and white funny papers, because I wanted them to be colored. I even tried to color the bedroom wallpaper because I thought it wasn't lively.

"In grade school, they gave me my own easel at the back of the class, because I would finish my work so quickly and then I would sit there and distract the other kids. But that didn't work either, because the kids would turn around to see what I was drawing or painting. So then they sent me out of the class to help the principal. I think that he really put me on the road to writing. When we left Rochester to move back to Virginia, he said, 'Remember you've got the talent to do anything you want to do as long as you stick to that one branch. Decide which one you want to follow and lop the other ones off.' And every time I would falter in my writing, I would think of him. "

She grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. "My grandfather was fanatical about his religion. When we moved to Portsmouth, my mother fell under his control, and he insisted that everybody go to church on Sunday morning and Sunday night and on Wednesday, and she resented it, she didn't want to go. And she didn't go, but she made me go.

"At first I liked it. (When I was in Rochester, I went to a Methodist church, where they didn't seem to have all those fire-and-brimstone speeches.) And I was kind of enthralled by how many women just worshiped the minister. Later, I got a little disgusted. I think the people are hypocrites -- that they go to church mainly to show off their new clothes. They turn away from religion and into things like clothes and gossip and malicious rumors.

Today, she no longer holds with any organized religion. "I don't think, right now, that I am very religious. I believe in God, but I don't believe in going to church. I think you can have church in your own heart or make your little temple. Maybe I am just making it convenient for myself, though; I don't know.

"I think I have a free-wheeling religion all my own. I have all kinds of beliefs. I happen to believe in reincarnation. And I know I'm an old soul. I tell my mother that she's a new soul.

"When I was a little girl, particularly when I was very young -- three or four -- I would look at things like automobiles and skyscrapers, and I would say, 'They didn't have those when I was here before.' I was sort of expecting horses and carriages. And then I would feel strange thinking this.

"I would often get flashes of other lives when I was a child. But as you grow older, and you hear adults say that you are crazy if you mention this or that, you begin to shovel it all under and you don't think about it or let happen to you as much."

She found, in reading and writing -- and in ambitions for a stage career -- ways of living other lives; but she was thrust into art as a vocation, against her wishes. "Teachers pushed me into art. Mother enjoyed my artwork; there, she could see what I was doing. Now, when I'm typing or writing on the computer, she can't see a thing.

"Even though the paint brushes were pushed into my hand, I really wanted to be an actress. I think it's very boring being one person. And when you are an actress, like when you are a writer, you can be all the people that you create. I always felt thwarted just to be Virginia Andrews. Maybe that's why I wanted to be everything. Then, when I had arthritis, I couldn't go on the stage; so I just accepted what I could do, and that was the art."

Her dreams of the stage were dashed in her late teens, when she was injured in a fall. "I was coming downstairs at school when my heel caught on something, and I fell forward and twisted to catch the banister. Later, the doctors found that the twist had been very violent, and that it tore the membrane on my hip and started little bone spurs."

The bone spurs led to arthritis, which -- combined with complications resulting from botched orthopedic surgery -- have forced Andrews to use a wheel chair. "I really don't like to talk about it a lot -- I get too emotional. A newspaper once said that I was 'paralyzed'. It made me really angry, because I am not paralyzed. They think that if you are in a wheelchair, you are paralyzed, or else you would be up on your feet. And I do walk; but since they don't see me walk, they don't think I can.

When I ask how I should describe her condition, she replies: "'Why do you have to describe it? I'm just another writer.

"Whenever I talk about it in interviews, whatever I say seems to be the wrong thing. If, for instance, I talk about the arthritis, then they say I dwell on it too much. If I don't talk about it, then I am reticent to talk about it. My editor asks why I don't write about doctors. I can't write about doctors -- I still need doctors. But I could write a book about all the things that have happened to me. And if I told you about it, you might think I was obsessed with that."

She is quick to agree, however, that her disability has played an intrinsic role in her fiction.

"Naturally, I think anything that affects you affects your writing. I don't have active arthritis now. They tell me it is sleeping, and I hope that it stays asleep, because I don't have the pain I used to have. But it is very traumatic -- particularly when you are young -- to be yanked out of the mainstream of life because you have an illness that comes on you so unexpectedly.

"Suddenly, you are not in control anymore. You are made helpless by circumstances that you don't have any say about. It's not just dealt to you. I always felt that if I had done some terrible thing, this would be a punishment; but I hadn't done anything yet. I thought, 'Why don't you give me a chance?'

"So it does affect you, and that's why I write. When I wrote Flowers in the Attic, all of Cathy's feelings about being in prison were my feelings. So that, when I read them now, I cry."

She states her unsurprising world view precisely: "I think the world is cruel. You find pockets of kindness, but you have got to make it yourself and be very careful that you have the right people with you, or it is cruel -- particularly when you are young and, I imagine, when you get very old."

Despite the frustrations and bitterness that resulted from her physical impairment, Andrews persisted in her work as an artist. In the midst of a grueling series of surgical operations, she completed a four-year art school program at home; soon, she was supporting herself respectably as a commercial artist and portrait painter.

"Fine arts doesn't pay a lot of money -- I had two or three gallery shows and so forth -- so I did commercial art in between painting at the easel for exhibitions. I later drifted into portraits because a doctor asked me to paint his daughter's portrait; after that, a lot of work came my way because he showed it to all of his friends. After my father died, and his income went out of the house, I started doing commercial work for the department stores, drawing bridal gowns and accessories and so forth."

When her father died in the late 1960s, the family moved to Manchester, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis; there, her childhood urge to create stories began to reassert itself. "I am somebody who has to be busy all of the time. And I've got to have something material that I've created, not just a piece of cooking that everybody eats and then it's gone."

In 1972, while living an Apache Junction, Arizona, Andrews began to devote all of her time to writing, completing her first novel, a science fantasy entitled The Gods of the Green Mountain.

"If I turn all of my interest and concentration on one thing, I am usually successful. Problems begin only when you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I was a successful artist, and because I kept moving around, I would lose my clientele. Then I would start investing in the stock market, and that made me stop wanting to paint. Then I moved again, and there weren't stock market quotations available on television, so I said, ‘Now it's time to write." I just didn't want to paint anymore, and I thought I was old enough then to have something to say.

"Also, I had grown tired of reading. I had read voraciously all of my life, and I grew bored with the stories that were being published. I had finished most of the classics by the time I was twelve; then I started reading modern novels. Eventually they became repetitious, and I think they are what bored me, because they were not writing I wanted to read. I didn't think they were truthful. Families were always too perfect, and I would look around at families, and I didn't see them as that perfect. So I decided to write the kind of book no one else was writing."

It took seven years of writing -- some nine novels and nearly twenty short stories -- before her first sale. "I wasn't persistent about sending my manuscripts out. If they were rejected once, I thought, ‘Oh, that's a complete failure,' and I would put them away and begin a new one. Momentarily, I would think that I wasn't going to write anymore, but then I would go right back to the typewriter and do it again.

"I just kept right on going. Every time I heard from an editor -- and I did hear from them, not just receive form rejections -- they would say, ‘If you get gutsy, you'll be sold. You're not gutsy enough.' And I really didn't know what they meant, to get on the gut level, so I began to think about it. I thought, ‘Well, I guess I'm writing around all of the difficult things that my mother would disapprove of.' So once I brushed her off my shoulder and got gutsy enough, I sold. I decided that I would have to be embarrassed and write these things. That's how simple it was. Now I don't feel embarrassed at all."

Flowers in the Attic -- dedicated, appropriately, to her mother -- was the result; it was, she notes, the fastest book she has written. "I like to amaze my editor and tell her that I wrote it in one night. I did. I plotted the whole thing in longhand -- it was eighteen pages. And then I typed it into ninety."

A revised and considerably expanded version was purchased by Pocket Books in June, 1978; upon its release in 1979 with an aggressive marketing campaign, Flowers promptly spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The announcement of an impending sequel caused Pocket to advance the publication date of Petals on the Wind by months, and it soared to the number one position. Each of her novels, including the single non-series book to date, My Sweet Audrina (1982), has topped the sales of its predecessors, with the final Dollanganger novel, Seeds of Yesterday, ranked by the New York Times as the top-selling fiction paperback of 1984.

The reason for her success, Andrews says, is simple: "I think I tell a whopping good story. And I don't drift away from it a great deal into descriptive material. I wanted my new book to be published in hardcover, and my editor said that if I wrote in a more boring style, I would go into hardcover. When I read, if a book doesn't hold my interest about what's going to happen next, I put it down and don't finish it. So I'm not going to let anybody put one of my books down and not finish it. My stuff is a very fast read.

"But," she laughs, "I said to my editor, ‘The next one you are going to get will be my most boring book.'

"I write mainly to entertain. I don't think people want moral lessons; in fact, they come up to me and say, ‘You never make a moral judgement.' That is one of my assets. Readers like the fact that I don't say whether I am for it or against it. But if you read between the lines, you can tell...

"My books also offer more of an honest viewpoint about families and the conflicts within them. I think families can be about the most destructive element in your life. Southern families are more tightly knit, and not always for the better, because people are inclined to keep themselves away from having lost of friends because they've got family. I know my mother feels like that -- she needs family, but she doesn't really need other people. I feel I do. Family sometimes are so close to you; they are opinionated. When you break the pattern they've fixed in their minds as to what you are, they are disbelieving. But you don't have to face that with other friends and outsiders and people that you meet."

---

Continue to Part II.

Full text © 1985 Douglas E. Winter