If you were an adolescent girl of a certain age—born somewhere between 1972 and 1992, caught between Gen X and millennial—you read Lois Duncan. If you didn’t read Lois Duncan, your friends did, and if they didn’t, their friends did. Duncan wrote nearly fifty novels, with titles like Summer of Fear, Stranger With My Face, and Killing Mr. Griffin; on each paperback cover, a portrait of a teenage girl with wide eyes and brown hair, haunted by something just out of sight. Fear, in Duncan’s world, lurked in a school hallway, in the eyes of a friend, in the trust of a teacher. Her novels revealed the small betrayals of teenage life, magnified in blood.

Lois Duncan—the pen name of Lois Arquette, who died on June 15 at age 82—had a canny brilliance all writers strive for: To create work that was intense and personal that also spoke to millions. Ask a Duncan fan, and there are legion, and none will have the same answer for their favorite novel. All, I may conjecture, will have the same underlying reason: they gravitated to what they feared most.

Books for teens had previously been sweet, even saccharine, like Maureen Daly’s story of two good-hearted Wisconsin teenagers in love, Seventeeth Summer (1942); socially conscious, like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman (1968) in which two students befriend a middle-aged outcast; funny and all-too-real, like most of Judy Blume or Louise Fitzhugh; or on-message, like Beatrice Sparks’s “anonymous” 1971 drug diary, Go Ask Alice.

Duncan’s novels revealed the small betrayals of teenage life, magnified in blood.

These books understood that girls of a certain age grapple with changing bodies, hidden longings, raging desires, and quaking needs. Duncan went even further, understanding that young girls also feared what those emotions could do, both to themselves and to those around them. Mysterious forces act on the heroines of Duncan’s books, as their developing adolescent personalities become the ideal vessels for ghosts, specters, and otherworldly phenomena. Kit, the heroine Duncan’s Down a Dark Hall (1974), is isolated in a spooky, Gothic boarding school by phantoms real and imagined, compelled beyond control to act as amanuensis for dead authors such as Emily Brontë.



Duncan knew about the young girl’s primal fear about belonging to the wrong group, or being excluded from the right one, and she infused both premises with terrible consequences, from the cult-like enclave of young women in Daughters of Eve (1979), the perversion of authority in Killing Mr. Griffin (1978) and the nasty secret binding friends with lethal toxicity in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973).