Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour is the fifth and final novel in a series of books about the Cutler family attributed to V. C. Andrews and published in 1993. It is allegedly based on the original ideas of Andrews but was written by ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. Andrews is the credited author. The novel made The New York Times bestseller list for paperbacks in 1993. Plot summary Darkest Hour is a prequel to Dawn. The last book in the Cutler series goes back in time to focus on Dawn's step-grandmother, Lillian. This book is about Grandmother Cutler's childhood and adolescence. Most of the book takes place at the Booth plantation, "The Meadows". Lillian Booth is the middle daughter of an overbearing planter known as the Captain and a delicate Southern woman who lives in a dream world of sorts. Her older sister, Emily, is devoutly religious and often hostile to Lillian; her younger sister, Eugenia, is sick with cystic fibrosis (a factual oversight on the author's part is that CF was not technically named until 1938, by Dr. Dorothy Andersen, and the book appears to be set shortly before and during the Great Depression. Lillian's family could not have known Eugenia's disease by this name). One day after school, when Lillian is just five, Emily tells her that she is not her real sister and that Lillian's real parents died because she is a Jonah and everything she touches will die. Distraught, Lillian runs to their mother, only to find out that she is actually the daughter of her mother's younger sister Violet, whose young husband was tragically killed before Lillian's birth. Violet died during childbirth and Lillian was taken in by her aunt and uncle to be brought up as their own. Emily constantly brings up the theme of Lillian being a curse throughout the book: she locks her in the shed with a skunk, and murders Cotton, Eugenia and Lillian's kitten (though she makes this look like an accident). She even claims that Lillian's first period is a sign of her evil nature, due to her young age. Emily also blames Lillian for Eugenia's death, saying that Eugenia was born after Lillian brought Satan into the Meadows and that was how Eugenia became sick in the first place. Eugenia dies from smallpox due to being weakened from cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that is not understood at the time that the novel takes place. Therefore, when Lillian asks for Dawn to be renamed Eugenia many years later, it may be an attempt to get back the little sister she lost so early and loved so much.