Source: The Washington Post, 10 May 1992, pX12

BOOK WORLD reader Elisabeth Cheely has a complaint worth sharing with a larger audience. In a recent letter to this section, she wrote: "I lost my head and bought a paperback called Twilight's Child in my supermarket. I believed it was by V.C. Andrews, the author of Flowers in the Attic, which I had enjoyed years ago.

"However, the quality of the writing was so bad that I read no further than the first two paragraphs, then looked at the note opposite the copyright page. There I found the following information, which I believe should be made available to the readers of Book World, to wit:

" 'V.C. Andrews is long gone, but her name has been registered as a trademark and the publisher responsible for this travesty hires hacks to write books under the trademarked name.' "

(Cheely is exaggerating a bit. The actual note in Twilight's Child is phrased a little more delicately. "Just before [Andrews] died," it says at one point, "we promised ourselves that we would find a way of creating additional stories based on her vision." It was a promise made, one suspects, with the bottom line firmly in mind.)

Some readers find it impossible to throw a book in the garbage, no matter how much they dislike it. Cheely is one of them. She gave her copy of Twilight's Child to her local library for their book sale.

"Imagine my chagrin," she wrote, "when the librarian looked absolutely delighted and said it was one of their fiction section's most popular books. This truly saddens me, but it saddens me even more to see the title on your bestseller list as the work of V.C. Andrews itself, which it is not. I wonder how many other Washington Post readers have been duped into buying or borrowing this piece of trash?"

Good point. The role of the bestseller list in the affair of V.C. Andrews is a crucial one, although it's not quite as straightforward as Cheely suspects. First, though, some background information.

V.C. Andrews was, like most horror writers, a colorful character: a believer in reincarnation and precognition who liked to say she wrote her first published book, Flowers in the Attic, in one night. Her skill with these dark fairy tales made her one of the biggest-selling paperback writers of the '80s, but she didn't have much time to enjoy success: she died in 1986 at age 50, only seven years after Flowers was published.

Andrews, who lived with her mother in Virginia Beach and suffered various disabilities, didn't like doing interviews. Shortly before her death, however, she made an exception for Washington lawyer and maven of the macabre, Douglas Winter. She told Winter she was planning to do other things instead of continuing to write about, say, four beautiful children kept in an attic by their evil mother for years (the plot of her popular Dollanganger series). A medieval novel, for instance.

Unfortunately, she was confronted by a creature even more implacable than an evil Mom: her publisher. Andrews said Pocket Books discouraged her from venturing out of horror even into the closely related field of the supernatural. "I am supposed to stay in this niche, whatever it is, because there is so much money in it," she said. "I mean, I have tapped a gold mine and they don't want to let go of it."

Her death made it much easier for Pocket to get its way -- with, of course, the full cooperation of the estate, which is the ultimate owner of the Andrews name. Each year there has been another Andrews horror novel. At first, they were careful not to note that the author was deceased. The books also looked as if she really wrote them -- i.e., no collaborator was listed. Who could prove that these weren't from a huge number of unpublished but really quite excellent horror novels by Andrews that had been found in a drawer somewhere?

Gradually, though, it became an open secret in the horror community that the Andrews books were being "completed" by horror writer Andrew Neiderman. This finally became public last year, after a British publisher who had lost out on the rights for a new Andrews novel raised a fuss. Pocket is now putting a disclaimer on the books, although on the outside the only clue to the author's status is a tiny trademark symbol next to her name.

The reason Pocket will keep publishing novels by "V.C. Andrews" until time immemorial is because they sell. Except for Cheely, most of her readers don't seem to know or care about the difference between the real and the fake.

Here's proof: The books Neiderman writes under his own name don't sell nearly as well as those he writes under the Andrews byline. Sure, this is odd -- you can put pickles in a jar labeled "chocolate," but that's not going to make them any sweeter -- but book publishing is less and less of a rational business. Still Blurbing THERE'S another bizarre element in the relationship between V.C. Andrews and Andrew Neiderman. One of his solo horror productions appeared as a Berkley paperback in January. Sister, Sister features a single blurb, which calls the novelist "a master of psychological thrillers." It's attributed to V.C. Andrews.

Did Neiderman write this blurb in his Andrews persona and then put it on his own book? Or is Andrews communicating from the grave? Questions of authenticity get quite tricky in mass-market publishing.

But this isn't as odd as a previous Neiderman paperback, Brainchild. This one was issued by Pocket Books as a paperback original in 1981, complete with just one blurb by, yes, V.C. Andrews: "Chilling suspense . . . a real page turner I read in one sitting!" Is it fair to ask if that's a phrase a woman would use who had been in a wheelchair most of her adult life?

Blurbs in general are best viewed as suspicious until proved otherwise. For one thing, a determined publisher can extract positive quotes from reviews that, read in their entirety, offer only lukewarm praise -- or worse.

Full text © The Washington Post, 10 May 1992