There’s something upstairs.
Something on the roof or… maybe it’s inside. You hear scratching, footsteps, and when you are very quiet you can hear voices. Just the thought gives you goosebumps, so now find Andrew Neiderman’s “The Woman Beyond the Attic” and meet the woman who wrote about what happens up there.
You might have known this since high school, or maybe you were a young adult when you immersed yourself in the Dollanganger saga, the fictional story that began in 1979 with Flowers in the Attic. In this novel, we meet four brothers and sisters whose mother agreed, under duress, to lock up her children under the rafters of their grandparents. The series has become a national obsession, and as it happens, rumors have swirled about the author.
Cleo Virginia Andrews was born in Virginia in June 1923, the second child of a Navy man and “telephone operator” who lived a wild life while her husband was at sea. When Virginia was four, the family moved to Rochester, New York, near paternal family farm; five years later, the Great Depression changed everything, and the Andrews once again landed in Virginia to live with relatives.
These movements left their mark: even as a young child, Virginia considered herself “an old soul” and a firm believer in the paranormal. She claimed to have psychic powers and often imagined other fantastical lives she might have had.
This, Neiderman suggests, may have helped Andrews become a writer after an accident when she was a young woman resulted in a lifelong disability.
Neiderman describes the misfortune as a twist and a fall and an ultimate moment in a body cast that left Andrews “frozen in her teens for years” and in pain for the rest of her life. Indeed, his imagination and his fantasies were “clearly the door to escape the confinement that his illness had imposed on him”.
Scary stories are always a teenage favorite, and Dollanganger’s books were at the top of the list when you were younger. Half the fun was speculating what kind of mind could tell such a story.
“The Woman Beyond the Attic” finally puts an end to the rumors, as a wide and repeatedly picture, as author Andrew Neiderman picks up a lot of information in this biography. That, after a while, becomes little but noise; it doesn’t help that the verbiage is quite flowery, or that an abundance of interviewees and side stories serve to swirl the waters of this book. A little less would have gone a long way.
And yet, there’s an appeal here, in the form of information that may have escaped your attention since you first read the Dollanganger series. There’s also a chance to share: This story behind the story will appeal to a new generation of novel lovers drawn to the fortieth anniversary reissue of the original novel.
Absolutely, this is a fan book, and the unreleased short story that’s included here seals the deal. If that’s okay with you, let “The Woman Beyond the Attic” raise the rafters.
“The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story” by Andrew Neiderman. c.2022, Gallery Books $26.00 259 pages
