V. C. Andrews is far more than an author of popular gothic suspense novels; she has become a publishing industry. With her fabulously popular novel, Flowers in the Attic, and its sequels, Andrews established a mini-genre of psychological-horror-suspense that blends the twists and turns of the gothic novel with the ache and pain of emerging sexuality. At heart, Andrews wrote family sagas "involving gutsy heroines, huge fortunes, rambling mansions, passionate love affairs, and leaps across the social divide," according to an essayist in St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers. However, Andrews took this format one step beyond, using what the St. James essayist described as a "tinge of psychological grotesqueness and melodrama" to create modern Gothic novels of "betrayal and fatal attraction." Andrews deals in family curses, forbidden loves, and tainted blood-lines; a world in which children are often abused--physically and psychologically--by adults that sometimes...