SOURCE CITATION
"Lois Duncan." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photo © 1995 Michael Mouchette and provided by Random House.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
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 Times Literary Supplement 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." Equally enthusiastic was critic Sarah Hayes, who observed in Times Literary Supplement that "Duncan understands the teenage world and its passionate concerns with matters as diverse as dress, death, romance, school, self-image, sex and problem parents." But Hayes added that, while other writers for young adults show life in a humorous, optimistic light, "Duncan suggests that life is neither as prosaic nor as straightforward as it seems at first."
In most of Duncan's books, her protagonists are usually high school students--most often young women--who find themselves suddenly confronted with a sinister threat to their "normal" existence. "It is a mark of Duncan's ability as a writer that the evils she describes are perfectly plausible and believable," noted 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."
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1934, and raised in Sarasota, Florida, Duncan grew up in a creative household 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 pre-teen 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 decided to leave after one year to get married. .
One of her first serious efforts at publication was a love story for teens, Debutante Hill, which Duncan wrote in between magazine articles as a way of passing the lonely hours as a young homemaker and mother while her first husband first served in the U.S. Air Force, and then enrolled in law school. She entered the book in Dodd, Mead and Company's Seventeenth Summer Literary Contest. The manuscript "was returned for revisions because in it a young man of twenty drank a beer," Duncan once observed. "I changed the beer to a Coke and resubmitted the manuscript. It won the contest, and the book was published." While Duncan considered the story "sweet and sticky . . . pap," a reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor maintained that Duncan "writes exceptionally well, and has the happy ability to make a reader care what happens to her characters." Still, the prize--one thousand dollars and a book contract--did much to encourage the budding novelist, who, in 1958, suddenly found herself a published novelist at the age of twenty-four. .
When her first marriage ended in divorce, Duncan returned to magazine writing to support her family. In 1962 she relocated to Albuquerque, NM, got a teaching job at the University of New Mexico's department of journalism, and eventually earned her master's degree. In 1965 she married engineer Don Arquette, and since "the financial pressure was off, I also felt free to turn back to my non-lucrative, but immeasurably enjoyable, hobby of writing teenage novels," she once recalled. Over the years young adult novels had changed, however, and Duncan found she was no longer constricted by many of the taboos of the 1950s. The result of this newfound freedom was 1968's Ransom, an adventure story of five teenagers kidnapped by a schoolbus driver. When Duncan's publisher refused to handle the book because it deviated from her former style, Doubleday took it on, and Ransom became a runner-up for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award. It also received a healthy dose of critical praise, with reviewer Dorothy M. Broderick commenting in 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 established Duncan in a genre she would master to great success. .
While teaching, studying, and raising her five children, Duncan continued to publish young adult suspense novels, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer, Down the Hall, and Summer of Fear. Duncan's style remained consistent in its simplicity; as a writer for Twentieth-Century Children's Writers 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 elements are often supernatural; Summer of Fear features a young witch who 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. .
In a similar fashion, Stranger with My Face details a young girl's struggle to avoid being possessed by her twin sister, who uses astral projection to take over others' bodies. While 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," stated Zena Sutherland of the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. This depth is typical of all of Duncan's mystic novels; 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 supernatural 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." .
Duncan doesn't rely solely on supernatural events to provide suspense, however. In Killing Mr. Griffin, a teenage boy guides a group of friends into kidnapping their strict high school teacher and intimidating him into giving less homework. The teacher dies when he misses his heart medication, and the students try to cover up their involvement. "Duncan breaks some new ground in a novel without sex, drugs or black leather jackets," commented Richard Peck in New York Times Book Review. "But the taboo she tampers with is far more potent and pervasive: the unleashed fury of the permissively reared against any assault on their egos and authority. . . . The value of the book lies in the twisted logic of the teenagers and how easily they can justify anything." .
While Peck liked the beginning of Killing Mr. Griffin, he criticized the ending for descending "into unadulterated melodrama. . . . The book becomes an 'easy read' when it shouldn't." For her part, Duncan pointed to her readers to explain the style of her writing, noting that, to be read, her books have to be tailored to a generation of teens more familiar with television than novels. "Television has had an enormous effect upon youth books," she once stated. "Few of today's readers are patient enough to wade through slow paced, introductory chapters as I did at their ages to see if a book is eventually going to get interesting." Television "has conditioned its viewers to expect instant entertainment," the author continued, and because of this, "writers have been forced into utilizing all sorts of TV techniques to hold their readers' attention." .
Perhaps one of Duncan's most well-known novels, Daughters of Eve features a dangerous leader: a faculty adviser who leads a high school girls' club into increasingly more violent acts in the name of feminism. The book's portrayal of a negative feminist element drew some strong remarks from critics. "It has an embittered tone of hatred that colors the characterization," suggested Zena Sutherland in her Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books review. Jan M. Goodman presented a similar assessment in Interracial Books for Children Bulletin: Duncan "clearly places a harsh value judgment on violent solutions, and . . . she leaves the impression that fighting for women's rights leads to uncontrollable anger and senseless destruction. . . . The book's deceptive interpretation of feminism plus its dangerous stereotypes make it a harmful distortion of reality." But Natalie Babbitt found the work "refreshing" and liked the fact that "there are no lessons." In New York Times Book Review, Babbitt compared the novel to William Golding's Lord of the Flies and concluded that Daughters of Eve "is strongly evenhanded, for it lets us see that women can be as bloodthirsty as men ever were." .
Even though she features extraordinary events in her books, "the things I have written about as fiction in suspense novels are no part of our everyday lives," Duncan once commented. This reassuring fact, however, was shattered in 1989 when her youngest daughter, Katilin, 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 Kaitlin--is run down and killed by a hitman in a Camaro. "In July 1989," Duncan recalled, "Kait was chased down and shot to death by a hitman in a Camaro." This brutal crime would involve Duncan and her family in a police investigation similar to that described in Killing Mr. Griffin, and dealings with a psychic like the one described in Duncan's novel The Third Eye. While three men were arrested, none were charged with the murder. .
Duncan shared her tragic experience with readers in Who Killed My Daughter?, which was published in 1992 in the hope that it might be read by someone with information on her daughter's murder. Through private investigators hired by the family, she learned that her daughter's boyfriend had been involved in an insurance fraud scam, and suspects that Kaitlin 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 the novel she had just published. "It was as if these things I'd written about as fiction became hideous reality," Duncan explained to interviewer Roger Sutton in School Library Journal. .
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 noted in her appraisal for Voice of Youth Advocates that readers might "get lost in the myriad of minutia" Duncan marshals in her effort to solve the crime--numerous transcripts and other factual evidence is presented in the book--the critic went on to add that "the strength and tenacity of Duncan is admirable." .
Several years after the murder, Duncan and her husband moved to the West Coast to attempt to rebuild their life. Meanwhile, the coincidences between her daughter's murder and her own YA novel had led Duncan to contact Dr. William Roll, a director at the Psychical Research Foundation and an expert in Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP) who explained to Duncan that, as she told Sutton, "precognition is very much a proven reality, that it's also been proven that people who are creative individuals have much more psychical ability than others." .
For several 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, about the Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey circus that wintered near Duncan's childhood home in Florida, and The Magic of Spider Woman, a retelling of a Navajo myth that a Publishers Weekly contributor praised for its "thoughtful message, grounded in well-chosen details and adeptly relayed through (Duncan's) personable storytelling." However, with 1997's Gallows Hill, Duncan returned to her characteristic suspense format, as protagonist Sarah, the new girl in town, attempts to gain popularity by starting a fortune-telling business. When her fortunes prove accurate and she becomes haunted by dreams of the Salem Witch Trials of the seventeenth century, Sarah's plan backfires, and soon she is looked on with suspicion by what a Publishers Weekly contributor described as "adults (who) are unsympathetic and clueless, allowing their teens to run rampant into the alluring arms" of an evil Sarah's supernatural ability seems to have unleashed. In Voice of Youth Advocates critic Delia A. Culberson praised Duncan's ability to meld historical fact with compelling fiction, dubbing Gallows Hill "an unusual and intriguing tale peopled with believable characters. . . . (that) illustrates how ignorance and bigotry can prevail against fairness and common sense." .
In 1995 Duncan teamed with Dr. Roll to write Psychic Connections: A Journey into the Mysterious World of Psi, which provides teens with explanations of various types of psychic phenomenon--ghosts, telepathy, ESP, psychic healing--from a balanced perspective. Duncan shows how data and facts can be misconstrued, and she also explores how the psychic interviewing process works, relating such things to her own inconclusive experiences with the paranormal in the case of her daughter. School Library Journal contributor Cathy Chauvette found the book "compelling," while Nancy Glass Wright praised the work in Voice of Youth Advocates as "a comprehensive overview" that is "sometimes riveting." A more ambivalent reaction was experienced by Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books critic Deborah Stevenson, who viewed Psychic Connections as "successful neither as a collection of true mysterious tales nor as a science-based defense of a controversial subject." .
Several of Duncan's books have found their way onto television, and one even appeared on movie screens in 1997. Pleased with television adaptations of Summer of Fear and Killing Mr. Griffin, Duncan was understandably excited when movie rights to I Saw What You Did Last Summer were sold and production on the 1997 motion picture release began. However, she was dismayed by the film version, starring actress Jennifer Love Hewitt. "They made it into a slasher film," Duncan told Susan Schindehette in People. "And I don't think murder is funny." .
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born Lois Duncan Steinmetz, April 28, 1934, in Philadelphia, PA; daughter of Joseph Janney (a magazine photographer) and Lois (a magazine photographer; maiden name, Foley) Steinmetz; married an attorney, 1953 (marriage ended, c. 1962); married Donald Wayne Arquette (an electrical engineer), July 15, 1965; children: (first marriage) Robin, Kerry, Brett; (second marriage) Donald Jr., Kaitlyn (deceased). Education: Attended Duke University, 1952-53; University of New Mexico, B.A. (cum laude), 1977. Memberships: National League of American PEN Women, Society of Children's Book Writers, New Mexico Press Women, Phi Beta Kappa. Addresses: Agent--c/o Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014. .
CAREER
Writer; magazine photographer; instructor in department of journalism, University of New Mexico, 1971-82. Lecturer at writers' conferences.
