If There Be Thorns — V.C. Andrews

Chris and Cathy Made Such a Loving Home...
for fourteen-year-old Jory -- so handsome, so gentle. And for Bart, who had such a dazzling imagination for a nine year old.

Then the lights came on in the house next door. Soon the Old Lady in Black was there, watching them, guarded by her strange old butler. Soon she had Bart over for cookies and ice cream and asked him to call her "Grandmother."

And soon Bart's transformation began...

Fed by the hint of terrible things about his mother and father ... leading him into shocking acts of violence.

Now while this little boy trembles on the edge of madness, his anguished parents await the climax to a horror that flowered in an attic long ago, a horror whose thorns are still wet with blood, still tipped with fire.