V. C. Andrews’ most horticultural and inbred series continues with If there be thorns, the further misadventures of the surviving Dollangangers (try not to think of them as the Dollbangers). Cathy is a ballerina and her brother Chris is a doctor, while Cathy’s sons, the teenaged Jory and the nine-year-old Bart (both of whom are the narrators of the novel), are a budding ballet dancer and a budding psychopath, respectively. Bart is in the position of Carrie in book #2 – compared to his dazzling, talented older sibling, he’s plain and inept. To rub it in that he isn’t small, sweet and cute, Cathy decides to adopt an adorable baby girl whose mother, a friend of hers, is dying (expect a lot of death in the novel). Chris has two objections to this.
The welfare of the baby girl herself is never an issue, and I also wonder if the dying mother might have preferred to commit her child into the care of Social Services rather than to a woman who’s sleeping with her brother. Cathy’s reason for adopting the child is that she always wanted a daughter (and a Cadillac, and a diamond necklace. Thank you, Santa). She and Chris finally have an argument about this, where Cathy proves her parental qualifications by crying, screaming, slapping Chris, falling down on the floor, and finally accusing Chris of permitting her to have sex with her late husband Paul just so that this would trigger a fatal heart attack. Even Chris’s adoration, which outlasted three other men, wears thin under this temper tantrum and he tells her that if this is how she feels, he’s leaving. Cathy does a 180-degree turnaround instantly, sobbing that she loves him, and slaps her own face to make up for slapping his. I imagined her empty skull crumpling inward under the impact, and it made the scene that much more palatable. Finally she starts kissing him. The best part about this scene is that it’s told from Jory’s point of view, meaning that he eavesdropped on his mother and stepfather having a very personal, er, conversation. And he’s supposed to be the good kid. Still, the voyeuristic Jory is so mature and perceptive that he even has an insight into Chris’s physical response to Cathy’s hysteria.
I could tell my stepfather felt impotent against all the anguish she displayed. Her histrionics had driven him into a corner…
Eventually, though, Chris gets over that pesky flaccidity, because Cathy is just so hot that one can forget she has the mentality of a three-year-old. Jory leaves just as his mother is pulling Chris’s zipper down; perhaps it finally dawned on him that they weren’t interested in a threesome. Anyway, the sex is so good that Chris gives in to his sister’s importunings and the baby girl, Cindy, is brought to their house. The queen thereby gets her pawn, but Bart, jealous of the new arrival, acts out a lot by saying nursery rhymes and spilling milk, though this is nothing compared to his later antics.
Cathy and Chris have raised Bart to believe that he is the son of Chris’s older brother, the late Dr. Paul Sheffield, although Chris and Paul were not blood relations and Bart is really the son of Bartholemew Winslow, who happened to be married to Cathy’s and Chris’s Momma although he was Cathy’s lover. Needless to say, this tangled web will be unravelled sooner or later, causing Bart much angst; the only question is, who will do so? The answer comes when someone moves into the house next door, and Jory and Bart notice that it’s a lady who keeps her face heavily veiled in black. Since V. C. Andrews and multiculturalism do not exactly go hand-in-hand, the woman turns out to be not a Muslim, but a blast from the past who has good reason to keep her face covered. That’s right – it’s Cathy’s and Chris’s Momma, who has been released from the asylum. Momma befriends Bart after he slips into her house, and tells him that she’s his grandmother and that she loves him (run, Bart, run!). Bart asks her for a pony (run, pony, run!). However, Momma’s creepy butler, John Amos, sees a chance to sow the seeds of corruption in this innocent child (run, readers, run!).
Since John Amos has not one but two biblical names, you know he has to be the epitome of evil, and he fulfils his plot function by giving Bart the diary of Malcolm Foxworth, who is Cathy’s and Chris’s evil dead grandfather, Momma’s father and Cathy’s and Chris’s dead Daddy’s half-brother. Feel free to draw a flowchart, by the way. To no one’s surprise, Malcolm turns out to be obsessed with his Momma, who left his Daddy for another man, and he grows up a self-righteous misogynist who falls for his Daddy’s second wife. I think I see a pattern here. John 3:16 – I mean Amos – tells Bart that he can grow up to be as strong and powerful as Malcolm, and then take revenge on all women, and Bart swallows it hook, line and stinker. What John Amos gets out of this is unclear, though there are hints that he lived vicariously through Malcolm and is now trying to live vicariously through Bart. I can see what V. C. Andrews was trying to accomplish here, but it doesn’t quite work; when a brave and noble character is slowly corrupted (a la Macbeth), that’s one thing, but there’s nothing particularly brave or noble about Bart. Most of the time, he’s an annoying kid, so there’s no emotional impact in his seduction to the Dark Side. There’s no titanic struggle of Good Bart vs. Evil Bart : it’s more like Irritating Bart vs. Psychotic Bart. And this is starting to sound more and more like the plot of a Simpsons Halloween episode, so on with the story.
Being the goodness and light to John Amos’s evil and darkness, Momma gives Bart a St. Bernard puppy instead of a pony, and after throwing a hissy fit over this, Bart decides that the puppy is a pony, so he gives it hay and apples. The puppy, hungry for meat, eats him. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen; instead, we are treated to a description of how Bart and the puppy do everything together, and I mean everything. When the puppy urinates, Bart pulls down his pants and lets loose as well. When the puppy defecates, Bart… well, either he can’t crap quite as easily or V. C. Andrews quailed at depicting this (my money’s on the latter), so instead he picks up a big handful of feces to show the puppy that they’re that close. I wonder what he’ll do if the puppy survives to adulthood and then smells a bitch in heat.
Jory also has a dog, but this dog disappears one day and Bart finds it strangled and stuffed into a hollow tree. Terrified, he runs off, manages to gash his leg badly and gives himself blood poisoning, resulting in a long illness that leaves him even more crazed than before. When he goes to Momma’s house for the first time after his convalescence, he finds that she has fed and cared for his puppy in his absence. This fills him with a jealous rage; now the puppy won’t like him as much. Therefore he pushes the puppy’s food and water bowls out of reach and even removes the straw on which it sleeps, which was the final straw (no pun intended). An author wishing to create a psychopathic character has two choices. Either go for the educated, polite type (a la Hannibal Lecter), who is frightening for the sheer contrast between the sane surface and the madness beneath, or have the character brutal within and without, so the fear comes from knowing what the character can do to harm others and knowing that they won’t hesitate to do so. Bart, however, is a child. The most he can harm is a puppy, and this neither endears him to the readers nor makes him a terrifying character. Andrews seems to have realized this, since later Bart sneaks up on little Cindy and cuts off all her hair. Gosh, if I was a toddler, I’m sure I’d be wetting my diapers at this point.
When the narrative isn’t utterly implausible, it’s repetitive. Cathy falls during a ballet and hurts her knee, meaning she can’t dance again, just like her husband in the previous novel. This inspires her to take up another pastime, so she writes the story of how she and her siblings lived in the attic for over three years. So much for the constant theme of “We can’t let anyone know about this or we’ll lose our privacy!” Being Cathy, she fails to lock up her work, so both Jory and Bart regularly sneak in to catch up on their family hysteria, which puts paid to the last shreds of Bart’s sanity. Cathy and Chris try to reason with Bart and even take him to a therapist, who tells them that Bart loves Cathy so much that he resents sharing her with anyone. Even Oedipus would hobble away screaming from this family, since when Jory’s paternal grandmother visits them and realizes the truth, she demands that Cathy let her raise Jory. Her reasoning?
"He has the fire of my son, and the fleshly desires of my son for women."
We’re talking about a fourteen-year-old, albeit a fourteen-year-old who makes a habit of eavesdropping on other people’s private conversations. Jory is devastated to learn about the infidelities of his father, whom he had “adored as a saint”, when a saint he ain’t. Jory retires to his room to brood about this, while Bart, on a visit to Momma’s house, finds his puppy strangled (presumably by the evil John Amos). I’m torn between sadness and relief that the poor thing finally escaped Bart’s clutches. However, we’re moving towards the grand finale of the novel, the most unbelievable climax ever (and that’s saying a great deal). While Chris is at work one day, Bart threatens both Cathy and Cindy with a knife. Apparently he’s heard of Jack the Ripper and has adopted this serial killer as a role model.
“I kill strumpets too, and bad sisters who don’t know right from wrong.”
No doubt this would be very frightening if Bart wasn’t a skinny little ten-year-old kid. There are authors who can paint children as terrifying antagonists, but V. C. Andrews is not one of them, and Bart’s maniacal mumblings are too melodramatic to inspire any real fear.
“I am the dark angel of the lord.”
If he had said, “I am the sandman, here to put you all to sleep”, it would have been more realistic. Cathy, for once showing a spark of common sense, kicks Bart’s hand so that he drops the knife, then drags him to his room and locks him in while he screams that she’s a whore. Then the moment of intelligence is forever gone and never to be repeated, because she decides to confront the source of all his problems – i.e. the house next door and its inhabitants – and since Chris is at work, she takes little Cindy with her. Cindy comes off as an old, worn-out teddy bear, existing only to be tucked under someone’s arm and transported into the treehouse or the sandbox. And since Bart is the narrator, the author releases him from his locked room so that he can run after Cathy and report the action to the readers. When Cathy gets to the house, she finds a mysterious black-veiled woman who refuses to speak, but from the way this woman fingers her pearl necklace, Cathy deduces that it’s Momma. She then does a metamorphosis into an insane harpy and dances around Momma’s chair, kicking out at her every so often (that knee seems to be working just fine now). John Amos, Bart and Cindy stare at this combination of ballet and Tae Kwon Do before Cathy pulls Momma out of the chair, gets on top of her – no, please, not another incest scene! – and yanks at her pearl necklace. John Amos tries to stop the catfight, with the result that Cathy kicks him in the groin. So he grabs a poker and hits Cathy on the head. Momma screams that he’s hurt her daughter, so he hits her on the head as well. I was really hoping he’d hit Bart too, but alas, that was not to be. Thanks a lot, Miss Andrews, you raised my hopes there and then didn’t deliver.
John Amos tells Bart that they will imprison the unconscious Cathy and Momma in the wine cellar, but he has to take Cindy back to their house. Chris returns home and realizes that something’s wrong, so he and Jory set off to Momma’s house, with Bart following secretly. Bart’s like Houdini here; they haven’t made the locked room that could hold him. Along the way, Jory says that he still loves Chris – in other words, he’s gotten over that inconvenient little obstacle of Chris being his uncle rather than his legal stepfather, not to mention Chris being the first man who ever raped his mother, and Chris sobs in joy that he still has one nephew who thinks he’s tops. In the cellar, Momma tries to explain that she didn’t really mean to kill any of the children; she just thought she could make them a little sick and thereby get them out of the attic and into a safer place without making her mother suspicious. I’m not sure what’s worse : Materialistic Murderous Momma or Incredibly Idiotic Momma. Proving that she’s inherited all of her mother’s common sense, Cathy starts fighting again and knocks over a lit candle, thereby setting a pile of straw on fire. Chris sees the smoke and tries to rescue them, but John Amos hits him on the head as well, this time with a shovel. It’s like a Three Stooges skit. Jory then kicks John Amos in the groin – one almost needs a scorecard of what injuries are being inflicted on who and by whom – and Cathy and Momma struggle up out of the cellar.
We finally hear John Amos’s reason for wanting Momma dead; when she was a nubile young lass, she “flaunted her flesh” before him; unfortunately, said flesh was only for flaunting, not feeling up. Apparently, the experience of seeing a beautiful blonde he could never have turned him into the caricature we see today, and he determined to get his revenge on her. Now that his entirely realistic motivation is in finally in place, back to the action. Momma grapples with John Amos, hitting him on the head with an ashtray. V. C. Andrews really should have turned this book into a Cluedo game; she certainly does her own share of bludgeoning the readers over the head. Bart, having waved goodbye to reality at this point, is struggling to rescue a portrait of Momma, which he thinks is Cathy. Not a portrait of his mother, but his actual mother. He’s Norman Bates right down to the mother fixation. Cathy begs him to get out of the burning house (just like in book #2) with them, and finally entices him out by saying that she will send Cindy away because she loves Bart so much. At this point, I’m thinking that Cindy might have had a happier life if she had been in Oliver Twist’s workhouse. Bart eventually does get out, much to my disappointment, but Momma dies from all the excitement. John Amos presumably dies too. Cathy is broken-hearted – at Momma’s death, not John Amos’s – but it’s (sob!) too late for her to ask for forgiveness now. The angst is just killing me, though I suppose that’s a better death than being hit on the head.
The conclusion of the story, narrated by Cathy, is how she publishes the story of their early exploits (hopefully she used a pseudonym; I’m thinking Attic-us Finch). Then they buy Bart a pony and a puppy to compensate either for Cindy’s continued existence or for John Amos’s unleashing all Bart’s Freudian and homicidal tendencies. And this is how Bart repays their generosity.
He steals into our room at night, having taught himself how to pick locks, and stares down at Chris and me while I feign sleep, holding still, breathless, until he leaves.
Either bars and security chains don’t exist in Andrewsworld, or Cathy is using Bart’s nocturnal visits as a form of birth control. It’s amazing how fatalistically resigned everyone seems to be to Bart’s antics, but perhaps they realized they needed him as the antagonist for the next book; now that she’s in the writing business, Cathy’s aware of the need to generate new material for sequels. And Bart doesn’t disappoint her, since in the next book he finds yet another old, twisted, misogynistic, religious-fanatic long-lost relative of the family to reprise the John Amos role (this is the official point at which V. C. Andrews ran out of new ideas and started recycling old ones). Spurred on by this Palpatine to his Darth Vader, Bart rebuilds the grandmother’s house and seduces his brother’s wife. Poor beleaguered Jory has other problems, since someone engineers an accident where he is crippled, just as both his parents were in the previous two books. The wife gives birth to twins whom Cathy sometimes refers to as Cory and Carrie, even though these aren’t their real names. Cindy, after years of ill-treatment from Bart, turns into the Slut Sister, though since her Slut Sisterhood is more or less caused by him, you know she’ll be redeemed in the end. Finally, Chris dies in a car accident, just like their Daddy did, and this is the catalyst for Bart to realize how wrong he’s been, so he repents of his sins and becomes a televangelist. No, I’m not kidding about this. He’s also such a charismatic figure that “money poured into his coffers”. At least V. C. Andrews got that aspect of televangelism correct. And at least she learned her lesson from this, and never attempted to create a sympathetic psychopath again.