Review of Flowers in the Attic

I read Flowers in the Attic (under the Finnish title Flowers of the darkness)) as a teenager. I did not know it was supposedly scandalous in USA for it's content: violence was melodramatic instead of hardhittingly realistic and the romantic(ized) incest fantasy was just that: PG spice. There was no sleazy, trashy horror scum in this book - V C Andrews is not Jack Ketchum or even Stephen King - just Gothic romance melodrama. The movie kept the striking Old dark house setting and entertainingly villainous Christian fanatics, but took away the incest. Rats! Louise Fletcher, the depraved nurse torturing mentally ill in the socially critical One flew over cuckoo's nest, was again the source of evil - in all Andrews books everybody over 25 was the necessary evil - and Kirsty Swanson was blonde enough to play the "innocent" heroine Cathy.