![]() ![]() For the first time, members of Andrews' family have agreed to be interviewed about the woman who terrified - and delighted - a generation of readers.Īny summation of Cleo Virginia Andrews' life reads like the back cover of one of her books. A new one, The Unwelcomed Child, will be released Monday.Īs eerie as her books were, Andrews' tragic personal life and unlikely rise - which was not even impeded by the small matter of her death - have rendered her equally mysterious. Andrews book, her novels continue to come out at a clip of two a year. She had published seven novels at the time of her death under Neiderman, whose name has never been printed within a V.C. As a best-selling author and unlikely purveyor of fantastical teen-girl nightmares, Andrews became wealthy during her short professional writing career. In life, Andrews was a wheelchair-bound Southerner whose mother was her caretaker. "I can't think of another book series that had that grip on people." "This was certainly the Twilight and Hunger Games of our time, for my generation," said 46-year-old Rob Sharenow, Lifetime's executive vice president and general manager. But it wasn't always like this: Flowers in the Attic's crossover from teen-to-adult zeitgeist was unique, and created the template for the young adult blockbuster. Since the first Twilight movie exploded in 2008, it's been boom times for YA book-to-screen franchises The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was the top-grossing movie of last year. ![]() In 2014, we're used to young adult books being a big part of mainstream culture. (Among other things, it includes the sexual brother–sister relationship, which the previous version excised.) The groundswell of excitement for the Lifetime movie has been so great that the channel announced last week that it's already developing the sequel, Petals on the Wind. As opposed to the dreadful 1987 feature film - with Louise Fletcher, Victoria Tennant, and Kristy Swanson - it is faithful to the book. Andrews became a phenomenon upon the 1979 release of the gothic incest classic Flowers in the Attic, which has endured as a nostalgia-fueled oddity: Lifetime's TV movie version of it - starring Heather Graham, Ellen Burstyn, Kiernan Shipka, and Mason Dye - premieres Saturday night. Keeping her alive - even if just in spirit - was simply smart business. And though Andrews' death was not a secret (all the major newspapers carried her obituary), in a pre-internet age, it was easy enough to continue publishing books under her name so prolifically that the news of her death might have faded from your memory - if you had happened to hear of it at all. ![]() Andrews since shortly after she died from breast cancer in December 1986. Neiderman has been ghostwriting the novels of V.C. "I leaned over to the one who spoke English, and said, 'Can you tell me why she's been staring at me for the last half hour?'" The answer was due to a common mistake: She didn't understand why this hugely successful and beloved female author was, in fact, a 48-year-old man. "After a while it gets a little unnerving," said writer Andrew Neiderman over lunch at a restaurant in Palm Springs, recalling a 1989 meeting with three South Korean publishers, one of whom looked particularly perplexed. Andrews had been dead for years and no one seemed to notice.
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