The V.C. Andrews Primer: Part 1, the Pattern

Sure, most people have heard or read about that fantastic bit of literature known as Flowers in the Attic, but did you know that there are actually more than forty books "written" by the one(s) known as V.C. Andrews? She actually died in 1986, after writing or inspiring two series and one standalone book and everything since has actually been written by Andrew Neiderman, the guy who wrote The Devil's Advocate. V.C. Andrews books are notable for two things: the incest and the series structure. I promise you, that's (mostly) not as horrible as it sounds. In my oh so subtle attempt to force these books even more upon the masses, I thought it would be fun to break down the pattern in sort of a V.C. Andrews manifesto-esque way.

There's one standalone book (My Sweet Audrina) and several series that are made up of five books. There are regular series (about three generations of a family) and miniseries. Since the miniseries pattern is boring and basically consists of four girls each getting their own book and then coming together for book five, I'm just going to concentrate on the regular series. To me, there are five: Dollanganger, Casteel, Cutler, Landry, and Logan. Everything after that blows harder than Chloe Sevigny in Brown Bunny.

First, the girl who's going to carry us through most of the books in her series. She's always beautiful and generally has an artistic ability like dancing, singing, painting, or playing an instrument. With the exception of Cathy, all the girls have names that are nouns (yes, I know that technically all names are nouns but you get my meaning here) that double as the books' titles i.e. Heaven, Dawn, Ruby, Melody. She's beautiful and sweet and the object of obsession of every man who crosses her path and would totally be a Mary Sue if she didn't consistently make terrible decisions.

Every book in her series has a title that refers to the girl's name (Melody's books have musical titles, Dawn's are about time of day, etc). In book one the character is living with her family and even though she's poor she's reasonably happy. Then BAM! a beloved parent or grandparent dies (and about 50% of the time the girl finds out she wasn't really related to that person) and our heroine is now thrust into the world of crazy rich people, her biological family. She's unhappy because she's either locked in an attic, forced to work as a maid, ignored, or people are mean to her. We are to take from this that rich people are all terribly flawed, unhappy, miserable creatures, and it's a lot better to be poor. With the way the economy has been lately, I'm more than happy to take that lesson and pretend that it's true.

Books two and three are when the girl grows up, goes to school, grows a backbone, and confronts her demons from the first book. Some crazy biological twist is revealed, like if she thought he was her brother, he now isn't so she gets involved with him or she's dating someone and happy until she finds out he is her brother at which point she drops him, but he remains obsessed with her for the rest of their lives. Substitute uncle or cousin for brother when need be. She eventually marries the guy who's in love with her who's not her brother and has a kid -though usually not with her husband or in that order.

Book four is usually from the girl's kid's (usually a daughter) point-of-view. Our heroine dies or goes nuts and it's now up to her kid to move beyond the family's incestuous tendencies despite more demons from her mother's crazy past. The wackiness (and generally everything that made the rest of the series fun) stops with them.

Book five, the prequel. You thought the heroine had it all figured out, huh? Well think again because now it's time for either the heroine's saintly dead mother who died before book one or the evil grandmother who made her life a living hell to tell her story. Saintly mother's story makes her even more saintly and evil grandmother is now sweet and innocent and reveals the shocking incident that turned her into a stone cold bitch. Another crazy biological reveal usually happens, where either the original heroine was more closely related to certain people than she thought or she was never related to evil granny at all. The Logan series is lucky because it gets two prequels (Melody wasn't cool enough to get a kid) so there's double the fun with the big revelations.

http://thechickmanifesto.blogspot.com/2009/01/vc-andrews-primer-part-1-pattern.html