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

What does her mother think about her writing?

"She doesn't read it. She tells me she hears so much about it that she doesn't need to."

The principal reason for Andrews's success, however, is probably the degree to which she herself is present in the books.

"I don't think anybody who is perceptive can read my books without knowing me somewhat, although they would be wrong to presume that every main character I write about happens to be me. I have only one life. Even though I try to pretend I have many, I don't. I may be Cathy or Audrina for a while, but I always have to come back to being me. Although I give those people little bits of me, they are their own selves, too. For instance, sometimes when I am talking through Cathy, she says things I wish I could have said. You don't always think of those things in life, but when you are writing you can be very clever...

"I put so much of myself into writing that I feel like I'm in the book. I weighed one hundred and ten pounds when I began Flowers in the Attic, and when I finished, I weighed ninety-four. I live all of my books. When I go into my office, I lose touch with my conscious; I come in tune with my subconscious and it turns on like magic. So as I begin to push the buttons on my computer, I am also programming myself.

"It's a very powerful feeling. It's like being a little god, manipulating a small world. You are furnishing the houses. You are making the whole milieu and giving life to the characters. And you can wipe them out -- and sometimes, after they die, I bring them back to life, not supernaturally but through believable things. How many people can do that?

"I like that feeling, because I can live so many other lives. I have an uncle who came and said, ‘What do you write about, the things that you miss in your life? Things you can fulfill in your books?' And I said no, because a lot of the things that happen in my books, I wouldn't want to have happen to me. But I enjoy the awful things, because they are kind of fun."

Those "awful things" have led her to be classified, more often than not, as a writer of horror fiction -- a category with which she is not entirely comfortable.

"I have to admit I resent that sometimes, as an author, I am lumped into the horror genre. But there is an element of fear that I deliberately maintain throughout my books. They tell me I am very good at that, keeping you on edge -- because I like to be kept on edge.

"I don't write about the supernatural; in fact, when a so-called ‘horror' story takes on too much descriptive material, including mutilation, torture, blood, and so forth, I feel uneasy and quickly put down the book. I like the horror without graphics. I like the build-up and the suspense, but don't give me bloody details."

When she first seriously thought about writing, she began to study psychology: "The crime wasn't nearly as fascinating as the motivation. ‘Why, why, why?' was the question foremost on my mind -- and that's what I write about. The whys, the wherefores, and the results.

"I like to place ordinary people -- some with extraordinary talents -- in bizarre circumstances. Once, when I was given an award, I was introduced as the writer who fires life at you like bullets. My characters do have life's calamities fired at them like bullets when they are helpless and can't dodge. They are wounded, but live to struggle on, and before my book is over, they have suffered perhaps, grown, become stronger undoubtedly, and have learned to cope, no matter what the circumstances."

The fundamental element of terror, she believes, is lack of control. "All of us have a few things in common. We all have primal fears of being helpless, caught or trapped in a situation beyond our control. Don't we all like to think we are captains of our own ships, masters of our own fates?

"Unfortunately, the people most likely to be caught in circumstances beyond their control are children. Children, out of necessity, live on faith: faith in mommy and daddy, in grandparents, in aunts and uncles and friends and teachers, in drivers who stop to let them cross the street. So many to trust -- and so many who can betray.

"And when I began, as an aspiring author, to consider the genres of fiction, there was something in the air -- spores, perhaps -- burgeoning out of the collective subconscious, attaching themselves to the antenna I ran up. It was an odd sort of coincidence that I would start writing about child abuse right when it became very popular to write about it. There are so many cries out there in the night, so much protective secrecy in families; and so many skeletons in the closets that no one wants to think about, much less discuss.

"I tap that great unknown. I think my books have helped open a few doors that were not only locked, but concealed behind cobwebs.

"The face of fear I display in my novels is not the pale specter from the sunken grave, nor is it the thing that goes bump in the night. Mine are the deep-seated fears established when we are children, and they never quite go away: the fear of being helpless, the fear of being trapped, the fear of being out of control.

"The perfect life is the one in which we are the captain of our ship, and we are the master of our fate -- certainly that's the ideal way. And for a lucky few, the ship sails on without squalls, with our own hands at the helm; but life does get out of hand, accidents do happen, the wind does whip up and crash the waves, and death does strike before its time, and bad health does occur, and the bridge does collapse, and the tornado and hurricane do eventually come.

"What do we do when we make a wrong decision on a lonely highway and take the shortcut full of perils? How do we cope with a stalled car in the middle of nowhere? What to do when you make the wrong choice in a spouse? Cry, scream, pound ineffectual fists on the wall or floor? Not if you're one of my characters -- you fight on, learn to cope. And that's what I write about -- life and the unexpected curves it throws, showing my reading audience how to stay on top and guide a rudderless hip to home port.

"And if that is ‘horror', then it's a horror most of us have to face at one time or another. And if your life is sweet heavenly bliss, it will never be told by me."

Why does she think that so few contemporary women writers have written horror fiction?

"My response is based on the viewpoint of the women who read my books. I meet them all the time, and there are women who are crazy about my books but who always say, ‘When are you going to write a romance?' I think women are basically concerned with romance. There is this basic urge -- they have to have the man-woman thing all the time. They don't understand why I personally like to write the way I do. To me, it's more challenging than writing about romance. I don't think romance is enough. Women should have romance and careers and the thrills and chills, too.

"As I was growing up, I had to put the thrills and chills into my imagination, because they weren't there. Truthfully, I didn't want anything bad to happen, but I thought it would be exciting if I could get away with doing all of that. I think that I was thinking more like a boy. I read in the newspaper that boys like fantasy and science fiction, and girls don't -- but I always did. I had no other masculine interests -- I like dolls, but it wasn't enough. I always wanted something else.

"I don't see why women have to lead dull lives in fiction, just having romance. I say, ‘just romance,' but most women think it's all romance."

It is notable that it was not Andrews's decision to use her initials instead of her first name on the books. Her experience is no different than that faced some fifty years ago by women writing for pulp horror magazines, who often found that neutering initials or pseudonyms were necessary when writing stories of horror and violence.

"The publisher sent me a copy of the galley of Flowers in the Attic, and it read ‘Virginia Andrews.' Then, when they sent me the cover, it said, ‘V.C. Andrews.' So I immediately called up and complained. And they said, ‘It was a big mistake by the printers, and we can't change it -- we've already printed a million copies of the cover and it's too expensive to throw them away.'

"Then later, I learned the truth. It was an editorial decision. Men don't like to read women writers, and they wanted men to read the book. They wanted to prove to men that women could write differently -- that we don't write only about ribbons and frills and kisses and hugs, that we can really write something strong.

"A lot of my readers don't know I'm a woman. They write fan letters that begin ‘Dear Sir.' They also send me photographs in skimpy little bikinis -- or nothing. ‘I am willing to come be your secretary, to be your anything.' Of course, they don't write like that when they write to me as a woman.

"Without the initials, I think it's very likely that I would be discriminated against as a woman in a man's field. And I think some men may feel I have treaded into their field now."

How does she feel about that?

"I think it's my field. I've got it all to myself. Because I don't think anyone else writes the kind of novel I do. Although now that I'm successful, some people try."

Although she would like to try her hand at writing supernatural fiction, her publisher has discouraged her. "I am supposed to stay in this niche, whatever it is, because there is so much money in it. I mean, I have tapped a gold mine and they don't want to let go of it. I don't like that, because I want to branch out."

Her newest book, Heaven (1985), is firmly in the tradition of her Dollanganger novels; it is the first of a series of novels -- certainly two, although her publishers are hoping for four or five -- about the adventures of five brothers and sisters growing up in poverty in the West Virginia mountains. Andrews's experiences of precognitive dreams tell her that Heaven will more than fulfill the expectations of her audience.

"I perceived my father dying two weeks before he died. I dreamed he was going to die of a heart attack, and he did. I woke up and I was crying, and I told my mother, and she said, ‘Don't tell me, I don't want to hear it.'

"If I had a dream that the airplane I was taking was going to crash, I wouldn't take it. So before I take a flight, I try to remember what I dreamed. When I sent Flowers in the Attic off to my agent, I had a big house dream. This is the thing that has happened every time I have a big hit. I dream I buy a house so huge: it's beautifully furnished, like a palace, and it hardly has any walls, and I drive through it in an automobile.

"I just had another house dream; in this one, I bought two! So I know this next book is really going to be a smash."

But she also dreams that she will indeed "branch out." We talk of her hope to direct a motion picture based on one of her novels following Wes Craven's adaptation of Flowers in the Attic. In 1986, the first novel that she ever wrote, The Gods of the Green Mountain, will be published after substantial revisions; it will be a major departure for her, a fantasy trilogy aimed primarily at the young adult market. And she tells of plans for even more different books:

"I have a medieval novel that I would like to get published, and a fantasy that is going to be published. And I would like to write a book about someone who has a little bit of the same kind of clairvoyance that I have -- the ESP experience."

She pauses, adding in afterthought: "But I don't want to write that as autobiography."

Why not?

"My life isn't finished yet. I wouldn't have a good ending."

---

Virginia Cleo Andrews died on 19 December 1986.
The Gods of the Green Mountain was never published.

Full text © 1985 Douglas E. Winter