I didn't like this as much as the first one, but it's still a riveting - if consistently frustrating - read. What it does do, very well indeed, is the illustration of a very Gothic generational trauma. You can see it emerging and mutating in the kids, and dollars to doughnuts Cathy's children are going to be affected by it as well. It's just plain bleak in that respect, and despite the genuine success achieved by the two older children, now adults, it's very much a house of cards because they consistently keep sabotaging themselves in increasingly destructive ways. The horror is less overt, but it's still seeping away underneath, and Cathy in particular becomes more and more twisted as the years go by.

She's the source of the frustration for me. In Flowers in the Attic, she was the most clear-eyed of the kids, determined to face the awful truths that her elder brother shied away from. I remember reading that book and wanting, amidst my sympathy, to reach through the pages and shake Chris for being so determinedly blind, so it's a little disappointing that Cathy has lost that sense of self and truth here. The whole book is basically her making one dreadful decision after another; her relationships with men, especially, are absolutely self-destructive. The thing is, I can't fault Andrews for that decision, because Cathy's awful choices are clearly the result of her awful life, and it's fairly realistic that she's not healthy or stable. It's brave to make her such a mess... but it's a mess that just goes on and on. This book is at least a third too long, to my mind, and I can't help but think it would have been a tighter and more effective story were it considerably shorter.