by Lois Duncan
“What was it?” I asked. “Why did you take so long?”
“I stopped,” Mom said, “to get you a present. I told you there was something I was planning to get you.”
She gestured toward the car window and I looked in and saw it, there in the backseat—the clownish white face, the cocked ears, the friendly, inquisitive brown eyes. It was a miniature puppy that looked just like Trickle.
“This has been such a difficult summer for you, honey,” Mom said. “I thought it might help to have your own dog again. Not that he’ll ever replace Trickle—you don’t replace a person—but he can make his own place in your life. All of us in the family have been so worried about you. We hate to see you so unhappy.”
And there in her eyes was the answer, the thing Sarah had not reckoned on, had not been prepared to handle, had not known how to combat.
It was love.
Once more it is summer. Golden summer.
I stand on the front lawn with the morning paper. The dog, Lucky (at four years old he can hardly be called a “puppy”), rolls around in the grass at my feet, begging to be played with. The sun is warm on my hair and on the back of my neck as I stand reading the article in section C. There are often such articles. There was a time when I skipped over them, hardly noticing they were there. But for the last four years I’ve read them carefully, paying attention to every detail.
A family lost in the mountains. An unidentified “girlfriend” of the daughter’s, lost with them. Their camper and belongings missing. Who, I wonder, is the girlfriend? Is she involved in the tragedy—or might she have created it? There’s a photograph of the family, but this girl isn’t in it. Was she the one who held the camera? Or did someone else take the picture, and did this girl not show up when the negative was developed?
“That part I cannot accept,” the professor told me. “It’s pure superstition.”
“But I found her destroying the film before it could be developed!”
“That proves nothing except that Sarah herself believed her image would not be there. She was taking no chances. If the film had been processed I would guess she would have been on it. Still, who knows?”
There are so many things we cannot know. Was Sarah a real witch or did she just believe she was?
My father thinks the latter.
“There are reasonable explanations for everything,” he says. “The steering failure in two cars could have been a strange coincidence. Hives can be caused by nerves. A dog can be poisoned. Teenage boys are often infatuated by girls who are different from those they’re used to knowing; such romances seldom last but can be very intense. Gas tanks can leak. An elderly man can have a stroke and partial recovery.”
“But the recovery began so immediately after Sarah’s leaving!”
“It could have been psychological. Just knowing she was gone could have given him the will to get better.”
She was gone when we got back to the house. It was Bobby who had released her from the darkroom.
“She kept yelling for me to help her,” he said. “How could I know I shouldn’t unlock the door? She said Rae was playing a joke and had shut her in there. When she came out she went to her room and got her things and left. She didn’t say where she was going.”
So we cannot know. We can only assume that she’s somewhere, entwining herself in the lives of those she meets, using them as she can to gain the things she wants.
Sarah!
Julia!
And so I stand now on the front lawn, reading, and behind me the door of the house opens. It’s a duplex, near the edge of the university campus, much smaller than the house in which I used to live with my parents and brothers. I turn and lower the paper and smile at the blue-eyed man who stands in the doorway.
“Hey, Red,” he calls. “How about fixing breakfast? Have you forgotten that summer classes start early?”
“No, Mike, I haven’t forgotten,” I say, laughing. “Isn’t it about time you learned how to fry an egg?”
I stick the paper under my arm and whistle for Lucky, and we head for the house. For too long now I’ve dwelled on the past. One cannot live indefinitely with shadows. The summer of fear lies well behind us.
It’s a time now of new beginnings.
Q&A with the Author
Young adult author Jenny Han sat down with Lois Duncan to ask her all about
Jenny: What drew you to explore witchcraft in the Ozarks particularly? How did you learn about the dialect there?
Lois: My mother was born in the Ozarks, and many of the superstitions in Summer of feAr were based upon stories she told me. Also, I had a high school friend, Marcello Truzzi, who grew up to be a well-known sociology professor who specialized in the study of the occult. We had kept in touch over the years, and whenever I had questions, I called on Marcello. He also advised me about books to read to learn more about the subject. Marcello passed away a couple of years ago, and in this revised edition of Summer of feAr, I decided to honor him by inserting him as one of the characters. I made him one of Rachel’s mother’s high school boyfriends. I think he would have been amused by the thought of being “part of the action” rather than just a resource.
Jenny: I always loved the Professor Jarvis character, because he is the first one to believe Rachel. Is he based on a real person?
Lois: He’s a composite of several wise people I have known and respected, Marcello Truzzi being one of those.
Jenny: I wondered if you were going to change the part about Peter having a crush on his cousin, and I noticed that in the updated version, Carolyn brings up how that’s a little skeevy. In the original, it wasn’t a big deal. Do you think “kissing cousins” were more acceptable thirty years ago?
Lois: I didn’t think much about that issue in regard to either edition, since I knew the romance—such as it was—wasn’t going anywhere. In the revised edition, I was developing Carolyn’s character a little further than I had previously, so I had her making more comments. That just happened to be one of them.
Jenny: Rachel has a premonition about the end of the book. Was this a conscious decision to “give away” the ending early on in the book?
Lois: That was a “plant.” A foreshadowing of the drama that lay ahead. And it added an element of mystery, since Rachel never identified the driver of the car that was bearing down on her in her dreams. I think the average reader would expect it to be Julia.
Jenny: Have you ever had a premonition or precognitive dream?
Lois: I’ve had premonitions surface in my writing but not in my dreams. A number of specific details that related to my teenage daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette’s, upcoming murder appeared in Don’t Look BehinD You, a book I wrote the year before Kait was shot. I didn’t realize that until after her death, so I didn’t regard those as warnings. I wish I had.
Jenny: Your books often feature a girl who has been displaced by another girl in her own home or family, and this often undermines her credibility when trying to expose misdeeds. Why do you think this is such a compelling motif for teens?
Lois: I think every teen can relate to the anger and frustration young people feel when adults do not take their fears and opinions seriously. Especially when they’re sure that they’re right!
Jenny: Have you ever been in that position, either as the teen no one will listen to or the adult who won’t listen?
Lois: Not as a teen. But I’ve certainly been in that position in the years since our youngest daughter’s murder. The police closed Kait’s unsolved case as a “random shooting,” but our family and outside investigators have accumulated a huge amount of information that we believe proves otherwise. We believe Kait was assassinated because she’d become a threat to criminal activities.
Jenny: What was particularly challenging about updating each book?
Lois: The biggest challenge in updating these stories and bringing them into the present day was the dramatic change in technology since the time they were written. Remember, some of th
ese books were written in the 1970s. And a very strong plot element in many of my novels was the fact that the endangered heroines were unable to cry out for help. But today, most teenagers have cell phones. They can call—they can text—they have laptops and iPads—nobody is isolated. I had to find ways of getting rid of those communicative devices in book after book. And I couldn’t use the same method more than once, because people might read these new editions backto-back, so they’d notice if I repeated myself.
Jenny: Many of your books have paranormal elements—did you go through a period when you were especially interested in these types of subjects?
Lois: I have always been interested in the paranormal. (That interest took on a new dimension in 1989, when Kait was murdered and psychic detectives gave us more information than the police did.) But back when I wrote these particular books, I had not yet been personally exposed to the study of parapsychology. I considered it fantasy—yet wasn’t quite sure it was fantasy. I used it primarily because it made for good story material.
Jenny: Can you tell us a little about your writing process?
Lois: People often ask me, “Do you plot your books before you start, or do you let your muse be your guide and just go where you’re taken?” When you write in a genre, as I do, you have to lay out your plot ahead of time. There’s a basic three-part structure for all genre novels: (1) Someone the reader relates to (2) reaches an important goal (3) by overcoming increasingly difficult obstacles. That means that, in order for the reader of a young adult novel to relate to the protagonist, that protagonist must be a teenager. In regard to Step Two, the more important the goal, the stronger the story. The most important goal for anyone is survival, which is why mystery and adventure novels are so popular. The next most important goal is love and acceptance, which is why romance novels are popular, especially with girls. And, for teenage protagonists, there’s a third and very important goal—and that is to grow up. The protagonist must mature during the course of the book and therefore be wiser and stronger at the end of the story than in the beginning. Once you develop your characters and set the goals for the protagonist (in my case, I usually set all three goals, and therefore have a main plot plus two subplots all going at once), you set obstacles in the way of the protagonist so he or she has to overcome them to reach those goals. That movement to hurtle obstacles in order to reach the goals is called “pacing.” So there’s a lot of planning that goes into my novels before I ever sit down and actually start writing.
Jenny: I’ve read all of your books many, many times, so I decided I would read the updated versions and see if I could spot the changes. Of course I noticed the cell phones and texting and e-mails, but I also noticed subtler differences, like name changes—Mother to Mom, Rheardon to Rolland. I think I know why but I’d love to hear it from you.
Lois: There were different reasons. Mostly it was to modernize the novels. When my children were growing up, most young people called their mothers “Mother.” Today they usually call them “Mom.” But when I went back and re-read those novels, I also realized that, for some unknown reason, I had tended to favor certain names. Perhaps I’d known people with those names and therefore was comfortable with them, so I tended to overuse them. I hadn’t realized I was doing that, because some of those novels were written ten or fifteen years apart. But now, reading them one right after another and seeing a last name like “Rheardon” pop up twice, I became very conscious of what I’d done, so I made the necessary changes.
Jenny: Can we dare hope to read an all-new novel from Lois Duncan in the near future?
Lois: I honestly don’t know what I’m going to write next. I’m in between projects, recharging my batteries.
Jenny Han is the author of several books for teens, including The Summer I Turned Pretty, It’s Not Summer Without You, and Shug, as well as Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream, the first book in the middle grade series featuring Clara Lee. She is currently at work on the final book in her summer trilogy, We’ll Always Have Summer.
Lois Duncan
Lois Duncan is the author of over fifty books, ranging from children’s picture books to poetry to adult non-fiction, but is best known for her young adult suspense novels, which have received Young Readers Awards in sixteen states and three foreign countries. In 1992, Lois was presented the Margaret A. Edwards Award by the School Library Journal and the ALA Young Adult Library Services Association for “a distinguished body of adolescent literature.” In 2009, she received the St. Katharine Drexel Award, given by the Catholic Library Association “to recognize an outstanding contribution by an individual to the growth of high school and young adult librarianship and literature.”
Lois was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Sarasota, Florida. She knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a writer. She submitted her first story to a magazine at age ten and became published at thirteen. Throughout her high school years she wrote regularly for young people’s publications, particularly Seventeen.
As an adult, Lois moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she taught magazine writing for the Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico and continued to write for magazines. Over three hundred of her articles and stories appeared in such publications as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest, and for many years she was a contributing editor for Woman’s Day.
Six of her novels—SUMMER OF FEAR, KILLING MR. GRIFFIN, GALLOWS HILL, RANSOM, DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU and STRANGER WITH MY FACE—were made-for-TV movies. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and HOTEL FOR DOGS were box office hits.
Although young people are most familiar with Lois Duncan’s fictional suspense novels, adults may know her best as the author of WHO KILLED MY DAUGHTER?, the true story of the murder of Kaitlyn Arquette, the youngest of Lois’s children. Kait’s heartbreaking story has been featured on such TV shows as Unsolved Mysteries, Good Morning America, Larry King Live, Sally Jessy Raphael and Inside Edition. A full account of the family’s ongoing personal investigation of this still unsolved homicide can be found on the Internet at http://kaitarquette.arquettes.com.
Lois and her husband, Don Arquette, currently live in Sarasota, Florida. They are the parents of five children.
You can visit Lois at http://loisduncan.arquettes.com.
“There are a lot of smart authors, and a lot of authors who write reasonably well. Lois Duncan is smart, writes darn good books and is one of the most entertaining authors in America.”
—Walter Dean Myers, Printz award–winning author of Monster
and Dope Sick
“She knows what you did last summer. And she knows how to find that secret evil in her characters’ hearts, evil she turns into throat-clutching suspense in book after book. Does anyone write scarier books than Lois Duncan? I don’t think so.”
—R. L. Stine, author of Goosebumps and Fear Street
“I couldn’t be more pleased that Lois Duncan’s books will now reach a new generation of readers.”
—Judy Blume, author of Forever and Tiger Eyes
“Lois Duncan has always been one of my biggest inspirations. I gobbled up her novels in my teens, often reading them again and again and scaring myself over and over. She’s a master of suspense, so prepare to be dazzled and spooked!”
—Sara Shepard, author of the Pretty Little Liars series
“Lois Duncan’s books kept me up many a late night reading under the covers with a flashlight!”
—Wendy Mass, author of A Mango-Shaped Space, Leap Day and Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall
“Lois Duncan is the patron saint of all things awesome.”
—Jenny Han, author of The Summer I Turned Pretty series
“Duncan is one of the smartest, funniest and most terrifying writers around—a writer that a generation of girls LOVED to tatters, while learning to never read her books without another friend to scream with handy.”
—Lizzie Skurnick, author of S
helf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading
“In middle school and high school, I loved Lois Duncan’s novels. I still do. I particularly remember Killing Mr. Griffin, which took my breath away. I couldn’t quite believe a writer could DO that. I feel extremely grateful to Lois Duncan for taking unprecedented risks, challenging preconceptions and changing the young adult field forever.”
—Erica S. Perl, author of Vintage Veronica
“Haunting and suspenseful—Duncan’s writing captures everything fun about reading!”
—Suzanne Young, author of The Naughty List series and A Need So Beautiful
“Killing Mr. Griffin taught me a lot about writing. Thrilling stuff. It was one of the most requested and enjoyed books I taught with my students. I think it’s influenced most of my writing since.”
—Gail Giles, author of Right Behind You and Shattering Glass
“If ever a writer’s work should be brought before each new generation of young readers, it is that of Lois Duncan. The grace with which she has led her life—a life that included a tragedy that would have brought most of us to our knees—is reflected in her writing, particularly (from my point of view) in I Know What You Did Last Summer. Her stories, like Lois herself, are ageless.”
—Chris Crutcher, author of Angry Management, Deadline and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
“Lois Duncan’s thrillers have a timeless quality about them. They are good stories, very well told, that also happen to illuminate both the heroic and dark parts of growing up.”
—Marc Talbert, author of Dead Birds Singing, A Sunburned Prayer and Heart of a Jaguar
