V.C. Andrews

Flowers in the Attic appeared in 1979 and did something its publisher had not planned for: sold to adults, it became a phenomenon among teenagers, and it has stayed one for four decades. Cleo Virginia Andrews wrote gothic family fiction, novels built on secrets, inheritance, isolation and a kind of forbidden intimacy the covers advertised without ever quite naming.

Her method was claustrophobia. The plots turn on children confined by adults who insist they are protecting them, and the horror is domestic and legalistic rather than supernatural: a will, a grandmother, a locked door, a family that has quietly decided a child is inconvenient. Whatever else you make of the books, that is a genuinely uncomfortable engine, and it explains why they were passed hand to hand in school corridors long after the publisher stopped marketing them to teenagers.

The original novel drew four sequels and two film adaptations. Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns and Seeds of Yesterday continue it directly; My Sweet Audrina is the standalone; Heaven and Dark Angel open a second family saga.

She lived from 1923 to 1986, and this is where the credit list gets strange. A ghostwriter originally hired to complete two unfinished manuscripts has been publishing under her name ever since, which means the majority of titles attached to V.C. Andrews are not hers: Dawn, Crystal, Willow, Daughter of Darkness, House of Secrets and dozens more are somebody else's work wearing her byline. That is not a scandal so much as a fact worth having before you pull a book off this list at random.