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Award-winning writer Lois Duncan’s young adult novels of suspense and the supernatural have made her a favorite of adult critics and young readers alike. According to reviewer Jennifer Moody, Duncan is ”popular … not only with the soft underbelly of the literary world, the children’s book reviewers, but with its most hardened carapace, the teenage library book borrower.”

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Young Creative Writer

Lois Duncan Steinmetz was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1934, and was raised in Sarasota, Florida. Duncan grew up in a creative family where her early efforts at writing were encouraged by her parents, noted photographers Joseph and Lois Steinmetz. She started writing stories for magazines as a preteen and progressed to book-length manuscripts as she matured. She enrolled in Duke University in 1952, but found it a difficult adjustment after the relaxed, creative environment in which she had been raised. She also grew frustrated with the lack of privacy in dormitory life, and left after one year to get married.

One of her first serious efforts at publication was a love story for teens, Debutante Hill (1958). The young homemaker and mother of three wrote this piece as a way of passing the lonely hours while her first husband served in the U.S. Air Force and then enrolled in law school.

When her first marriage ended in divorce, Duncan returned to magazine writing to support her family. in 1962 she relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, accepted a teaching job in the University of New Mexico’s journalism department, and eventually earned her bachelor’s degree. In 1965 she married engineer Don Arquette, with whom she had two more children. These changes inspired her to begin writing fiction again. In this period, she wrote Ransom (1966), a suspense novel that set the tone for the rest of her lucrative career in young adult fiction. While teaching, studying, and raising her five children, Duncan continued to publish young adult suspense novels along the lines of Ransom, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), Down a Dark Hall (1974), and Summer of Fear (1976).

A Real-Life Murder

In 1989 Duncan’s youngest daughter, Kaitlyn, was murdered in an incident that paralleled the plot of Don’t Look behind You, a novel Duncan had published just a month before the crime took place. In the novel, the character April—who was based on Kaitlyn—is run down and killed by a hitman in a Camaro. In real life, Kaitlyn was chased down and shot to death by someone driving the same type of automobile. The similarities between the fictional crime and the real one were unmistakable. Furthermore, the brutal crime ultimately involved Duncan and her family in a police investigation similar to that described in Killing Mr. Griffin (1978).

It also featured their use of a psychic similar to the one described in Duncan’s novel The Third Eye (1984). Although three men were arrested in connection with the murder of Duncan’s daughter, none were ever charged.

Duncan shared her tragic experience with readers in Who Killed My Daughter? (1992), in the hope that it might be read by someone with information regarding the chilling event. Through private investigators hired by the family, she learned that her daughter’s boyfriend had been involved in an insurance fraud scam, and Duncan came to suspect that Kaitlyn had learned of the scam and was planning to break up with him. As the facts became known, Duncan realized that other circumstances surrounding her daughter’s murder paralleled her fiction. The murder of Kaitlyn Duncan remains unsolved, however.

A New Focus

For the next few years Duncan focused on editing collections of suspenseful short fiction and penning books for younger readers, such as The Circus Comes Home: When the Greatest Show on Earth Rode the Rails (1993), about the Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey circus that wintered near Duncan’s childhood home in Florida. She also produced The Magic of Spider Woman (1996), a retelling of a Navajo myth. However, with Gallows Hill (1997), Duncan returned to her characteristic suspense format.

Several of Duncan’s books have found their way onto television and movie screens, including I Know What You Did Last Summer. A movie version of Hotel for Dogs was in production as of 2008.

Works in Literary Context

As a prolific writer of primarily young adult fiction, Dun can benefited from a shift in cultural mores as society loosened up in the 1960s. When she began writing her first suspense novel, Ransom (1966), Duncan found she was no longer constricted by many of the taboos of the 1950s. When Duncan’s publisher refused to handle the book because it deviated from her former style, Double-day took it on, and Ransom became a runner-up for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award. Duncan’s story of five teenagers kidnapped by a school-bus driver also received a healthy dose of critical praise, with reviewer Dorothy M. Broderick commenting in the New York Times Book Review that the character of Glenn Kirtland, whose consistently selfish behavior endangers the whole group, ”sets the book apart and makes it something more than another good mystery.” Ransom firmly established Duncan in a genre she would master to great success.

Duncan’s writing style remained consistent and simple. As a writer for Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers once observed, Duncan ”places an individual or a group of normal, believable young people in what appears to be a prosaic setting, such as a suburban neighborhood or an American high school. On the surface everything is as it should be, until Duncan introduces an element of surprise that gives the story an entirely new twist.” These surprise elements often feature the supernatural. In Summer of Fear, for example, a young witch charms herself into an unsuspecting family, while Down a Dark Hall involves a girls’ boarding school whose students are endangered by the malevolent ghosts of dead artists and writers. With its deployment of supernatural elements, Duncan’s novels merge young adult fiction with fantasy, separating them from other popular young adult novels such as those by Judy Blume, but linking them to a long tradition of popular fiction that goes back to the gothic novels of the early nineteenth century.

Works in Critical Context

Ever since her earliest successes with young adult fiction, critics have appreciated the extent to which Duncan takes adolescence seriously. As critic Sarah Hayes has observed in the Times Literary Supplement, ”Duncan understands the teenage world and its passionate concerns with matters as diverse as dress, death, romance, school, self-image, sex and problem parents.” While other young adult writers tend to show teenage life in a humorous, optimistic light, Hayes notes that ”Duncan suggests that life is neither as prosaic nor as straightforward as it seems at first.”

Duncan’s use of evil and the supernatural in her plots has also been praised. ”It is a mark of Duncan’s ability as a writer that the evils she describes are perfectly plausible and believable,” notes an essayist in St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers. ”As in her use of the occult, her use of warped human nature as a tool to move the plot along briskly never seems contrived or used solely for shock effect; it is integral to the story.” An example of this is found in Stranger with My Face (1981), which details a young girl’s struggle to avoid being possessed by her twin sister, who uses astral projection to take over the bodies of others. While in another author’s hands the novel’s premise might be difficult to accept, Duncan makes it possible and palatable by a deft twining of fantasy and reality, by giving depth to characters and relationships, and by writing with perception and vitality,” writes Zena Sutherland in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. This depth is typical of all of Dun can’s mystic novels, and a main reason for her success. As the writer for Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers commented, an element of the occult is an integral part of [Duncan’s] fast-moving plot, but it is always believable because Duncan never carries her depiction of the super natural into the sometimes goofy realms that a writer such as Stephen King does. Character and plot are always predominant; the books are first and foremost good mysteries made even more interesting for young readers by some aspect of the unusual.”

Who Killed My Daughter?, Duncan’s first work of nonfiction, was praised by numerous reviewers and was nominated for teen reading awards in nine states. According to Kliatt contributor Claire Rosser, readers will find this tragedy all the more poignant simply because it is horrifyingly true.” While Mary Jane Santos notes in her appraisal for Voice of Youth Advocates that readers might get lost in the myriad of minutia” that Duncan marshals in her effort to solve her daughter’s murder—numerous transcripts and other factual evidence is presented in the book—the critic ultimately concludes that the strength and tenacity of Duncan is admirable.” Critics were less unified when it came to Duncan’s other non-fiction effort, however. School Library Journal contributor Cathy Chauvette found Psychic Connections (1995), a nonfiction work that explains to teens various types of psychic phenomenon such as ghosts, telepathy, and psychic healing, “compelling,” while Nancy Glass Wright deemed the work in Voice of Youth Advocates ”a comprehensive over view” that is only ”sometimes riveting.” Bulletin for the Center of Children’s Books critic Deborah Stevenson was not impressed at all with Psychic Connections, calling it successful neither as a collection of true mysterious tales nor as a science-based defense of a controversial subject.”

References

Chevalier, Tracy, Ed. Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, 3rd edition. Detroit: St. James Press, 1989.
Duncan, Lois. Chapters: My Growth as a Writer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982.
James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd edition. Detroit: St. James Press, 1999.
Chauvette, Cathy. Review of Psychic Connections. School Congress. Library Journal (May 1997).
Hayes, Sarah. ”Fatal Flaws”. Times Literary Supplement (January 29-February 4, 1988).
Rosser, Claire. Review of Who Killed My Daughter? Kliatt (May 1994).
Santos, Mary Jane. Review of Who Killed My Daughter? Voice of Youth Advocates (December 1992).
Stevenson, Deborah. Review of Psychic Connections. Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (September 1995).
Sutherland, Zena. Review of Stranger with My Face . Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (April 1982).
Wright, Nancy Glass. Review of Psychic Connections. Voice of Youth Advocates (August 1995).