Duncan, Lois 1934–

(Lois Kerry)

PERSONAL: 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.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014. E-mail—loisduncan@arquettes.com.

CAREER: Writer; magazine photographer; instructor in department of journalism, University of New Mexico, 1971–82. Lecturer at writers' conferences.

MEMBER: National League of American PEN Women, Society of Children's Book Writers, New Mexico Press Women, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Three-time winner during high school years of Seventeen magazine's annual short story contest; Seventeenth Summer Literary Award, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1957, for Debutante Hill; Best Novel Award, National Press Women, 1966, for Point of Violence; Edgar Allan Poe Award runner-ups, Mystery Writers of America, 1967, for Ransom, 1969, for They Never Came Home, 1985, for The Third Eye, 1986, for Locked in Time, and 1989, for The Twisted Window; Zia Award, New Mexico Press Women, 1969, for Major André: Brave Enemy; grand prize winner, Writer's Digest Creative Writing Contest, 1970, for short story; Theta Sigma Phi Headliner Award, 1971; Best Books for Young Adults citations, American Library Association (ALA), 1976, for Summer of Fear, 1978, for Killing Mr. Griffin, 1981, for Stranger with My Face, 1982, for Chapters: My Growth as a Writer, and 1990, for Don't Look behind You; Best Books for Children citations, New York Times, 1981, for Stranger with My Face, and 1988, for Killing Mr. Griffin; Ethical Culture School Book Award, Library of Congress' Best Books citation, and English Teacher's Journaland University of Iowa's Best Books of the Year for Young Adults citation, all 1981, and Best Novel Award, National League of American Pen Women, 1982, all for Stranger with My Face; Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, National Council for Social Studies/Children's Book Council, 1982, for Chapters: My Growth as a Writer; Children's Books of the Year citation, Child Study Association of America, 1986, for Locked in Time and The Third Eye; Children's Book Award, National League of American Pen Women, 1987, for Horses of Dreamland; Margaret A. Edwards Award, 1991, School Library Journal/Young Adult Library Services Association, for body of work; ALA Best Adult Book for Young Adults, School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and Pacific Northwest Young Readers Award for Who Killed My Daughter?: The True Story of a Mother's Search for Her Daughter's Murderer; Junior Literary Guild award winner for The Twisted Window, Locked in Time, The Third Eye, Summer of Fear, and They Never Came Home. Duncan has also received numerous librarians', parents', children's choice, and readers awards from the states of Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, and Vermont, as well as from groups in England and Australia.

WRITINGS:

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

Debutante Hill, Dodd (New York, NY), 1958.

(Under pseudonym Lois Kerry) Love Song for Joyce, Funk (New York NY), 1958.

(Under pseudonym Lois Kerry) A Promise for Joyce, Funk (New York NY), 1959.

The Middle Sister, Dodd (New York, NY), 1961.

Game of Danger, Dodd (New York, NY), 1962.

Season of the Two-Heart, Dodd (New York, NY), 1964.

Ransom, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1966, published as Five Were Missing, New American Library (New York, NY), 1972.

They Never Came Home, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1969.

I Know What You Did Last Summer, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973.

Down a Dark Hall, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1974.

Summer of Fear, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

Killing Mr. Griffin, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.

Daughters of Eve, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1979.

Stranger with My Face, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1981.

The Third Eye, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1984, published as The Eyes of Karen Connors, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1985.

Locked in Time, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1985.

The Twisted Window, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1987.

Don't Look behind You, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1989.

Gallows Hill, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1997.

FOR CHILDREN

The Littlest One in the Family, illustrated by Suzanne K. Larsen, Dodd (New York, NY), 1960.

Silly Mother, illustrated by Suzanne K. Larsen, Dial (New York, NY), 1962.

Giving Away Suzanne, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, Dodd (New York, NY), 1963.

Hotel for Dogs, illustrated by Leonard Shortall, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1971.

A Gift of Magic, illustrated by Arvis Stewart, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1971.

From Spring to Spring: Poems and Photographs, photographs by the author, Westminster, 1982.

The Terrible Tales of Happy Days School (poetry), illustrated by Friso Henstra, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1983.

Horses of Dreamland, illustrated by Donna Diamond, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1985.

Wonder Kid Meets the Evil Lunch Snatcher, illustrated by Margaret Sanfilippo, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1988.

The Birthday Moon (poetry), illustrated by Susan Davis, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

Songs from Dreamland (poetry), illustrated by Kay Chorao, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.

The Circus Comes Home: When the Greatest Show on Earth Rode the Rails, photographs by Joseph Janney Steinmetz, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1993.

The Magic of Spider Woman, illustrated by Shonto Begay, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1996.

The Longest Hair in the World, illustrated by Jon McIntosh, Bantam (New York, NY), 1999.

I Walk at Night, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher, Viking Penguin (New York, NY), 2000.

Song of the Circus, illustrated by Meg Cundiff, Philomel (New York, NY), 2001.

OTHER

Point of Violence (adult), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1966.

Major André: Brave Enemy (young adult nonfiction), illustrated by Tran Mawicke, Putnam (New York, NY), 1969.

Peggy (young adult nonfiction), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1970.

When the Bough Breaks (adult), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1974.

How to Write and Sell Your Personal Experiences (non-fiction), Writers Digest, 1979.

Chapters: My Growth as a Writer (autobiography), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1982.

A Visit with Lois Duncan (videotape), RDA Enterprises, 1985.

Dream Songs from Yesterday (cassette), RDA Enterprises, 1987.

Our Beautiful Day (cassette), RDA Enterprises, 1988.

The Story of Christmas (cassette), RDA Enterprises, 1989.

Who Killed My Daughter?: The True Story of a Mother's Search for Her Daughter's Murderer, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1992.

Psychics in Action (audio cassette series), Silver Moon Productions, 1993.

(With William Roll) Psychic Connections: A Journey into the Mysterious World of Psi, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor) Night Terrors: Stories of Shadow and Substance, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) Trapped! Cages of Mind and Body, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor) On the Edge: Stories at the Brink, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor of over five hundred articles and stories to periodicals, including Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCall's, Woman's Day, Writer, Reader's Digest, Ladies' Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and Writer's Digest. Contributing editor, Woman's Day.

ADAPTATIONS: Summer of Fear was adapted as the television movie Strangers in Our House, NBC-TV, 1978; Killing Mr. Griffin was adapted as a television movie, NBC-TV, 1997; I Know What You Did Last Summer was adapted as a feature film, Mandalay, 1997; Gallows Hill was adapted as a television movie, NBC-TV, 1998; and Ransom was adapted as a television movie. Listening Library made cassettes of Down a Dark Hall, 1985, Killing Mr. Griffin, 1986, Summer of Fear, 1986, and Stranger with My Face, 1986; Don't Look Behind You, adapted as a "made-for-TV movie" by Fox Family Channel. RDA Enterprises made cassettes of Selling Personal Experiences to Magazines, 1987, and Songs from Dreamland, 1987. Stranger With My Face was adapted as a screen play in 2004.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A sequel to Who Killed My Daughter?, with working title The Tally Keeper.

SIDELIGHTS: 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 high school students—usually 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, and raised in Sarasota, Florida, Duncan grew up in a creative household where her early efforts at writing were encouraged by her parents, internationally renowned 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 she wrote in between magazine articles as a way of passing the lonely hours as a young homemaker and mother while her first husband served first 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, New Mexico, 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 Ransom, an adventure story of five teenagers kidnapped by a school-bus 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 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 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, Katilyn, 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 hit man in a Camaro. "In July 1989," Duncan recalled, "Kait was chased down and shot to death by a hit man 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?: The True Story of a Mother's Search for Her Daughter's Murderer, 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 she suspects that Kaitlyn 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 non-fiction, 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 lives. 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 extrasensory 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 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 con-tributor 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 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. The book received a somewhat ambivalent reaction from 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." However, 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."

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 Know 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."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 26, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Duncan, Lois, Chapters: My Growth as a Writer, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1982.

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Something about the Author Autobiography Series, Volume 2, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Twentieth-Century Children's Writers,3rd edition, edited by Tracy Chevalier, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1989.

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, August 1978, Hildagarde Gray, review of Killing Mr. Griffin, pp. 154-155.

Booklist, April 15, 1992, Ilene Cooper, review of Who Killed My Daughter?: The True Story of a Mother's Search for Her Daughter's Murderer, p. 1482; February 15, 1994, Ilene Cooper, review of The Circus Comes Home, p. 1078; June 1, 1995, Ilene Cooper, review of Psychic Connections, p. 1743; May 15, 1996, Stephanie Zvirin, review of Night Terrors, p. 1581; April 15, 1997, Ilene Cooper, review of Gallows Hill, p. 1420; July, 1998, Roger Leslie, review of Trapped!, p. 1873; February 15, 1999, Karen Harris, review of Don't Look behind You, p. 1984; February 1, 2000, Gillian Engberg, review of I Walk at Night, p. 1028; June 1, 2000, G. Engberg, review of On the Edge, p. 1882.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February 1974; January 1980, Zena Sutherland, review of Daughter of Eve, pp. 92-93; April 1982, Zena Sutherland, review of Stranger with My Face, p. 146; July-August 1987; September 1995, Deborah Stevenson, review of Psychic Connections, pp. 12-13; July-August, 1998, p. 393.

Children's Book Review Service, spring 1982, Leigh Dean, review of Chapters: My Growth as a Writer, p. 116.

Christian Science Monitor, February 5, 1959, "Widening Horizons: Debutante Hill," p. 11.

Horn Book, February 1965, Ruth Hill Viguers, review of Season of the Two-Heart, p. 59; April 1977, Ethel L. Heins, review of Summer of Fear, p. 167; February 1982; November-December 1993, Margaret A. Bush, review of The Circus Comes Home, p. 754; July-August 1996, Elizabeth S. Watson, review of The Magic of Spider Woman, p. 470.

Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, Volume 11, number 6, 1980, Jan M. Goodman, review of Daughters of Eve, pp. 17-18.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1973, review of I Know What You Did Last Summer, p. 972; January 1, 1982, review of Stranger with My Face, p. 11.

Kliatt, May 1994, Claire Rosser, review of Who Killed My Daughter?, p. 26.

New York Times Book Review, June 5, 1966, Dorothy M. Broderick, review of Ransom, p. 42; June 8, 1969, Richard F. Shepard, review of They Never Came Home, p. 42; November 10, 1974, Gloria Levitas, "Haunts and Hunts," pp. 8, 10; March 6, 1977, Julia Whedon, "Witches and Werewolves," p. 29; April 30, 1978, Richard Peck, "Teaching Teacher a Lesson," p. 54; January 27, 1980, Natalie Babbitt, review of Daughters of Eve, p. 24; August 16, 1998, p. 14.

People, November 24, 1997, Susan Schindehette, "Who Killed My Daughter? An Eight-Year-Old Unsolved Slaying Still Plagues Writer Lois Duncan," p. 103.

Publishers Weekly, April 20, 1992, Maria Simpson, "'Who Killed My Daughter?' Lois Duncan (and Delacorte) Search for an Answer," p. 19; March 11, 1996, review of The Magic of Spider Woman, p. 64; March 17, 1997, review of Gallows Hill, p. 84; June 1, 1998, review of Trapped!, p. 48; January 10, 2000, review of I Walk at Night, p. 67; June 26, 2000, review of On the Edge, p. 76; September 18, 2000, review of The Magic of Spider Woman, p. 113; February 12, 2001, review of The Longest Hair in the World, p. 214.

School Library Journal, November 1971, Peggy Sullivan, review of A Gift of Magic, p. 122; April 1974, Linda Silver, review of I Know What You Did Last Summer, p. 64; September 1979, Cyrisse Jaffee, review of Daughters of Eve, p. 155; November 1981; July 1989; June 1992, Roger Sutton, interview with Lois Duncan, pp. 20-24; August 1992 Barbara Lynn, review of Who Killed My Daughter?, p. 190; May, 1995, Cathy Chauvette, review of Psychic Connections, p. 125; May 1997, Bruce Anne Shook, review of Gallows Hill, p. 132; March 2000, review of I Walk at Night, p. 194.

Times Literary Supplement, March 26, 1982, Jennifer Moody, "The Onset of Maturity," p. 343; February 22, 1985, Anthony Horowitz, "Parent Problems," p. 214; January 29-February 4, 1988, Sarah Hayes, "Fatal Flaws," p. 119.

Voice of Youth Advocates, December 1992, Mary Jane Santos, review of Who Killed My Daughter?, p. 304; August 1995, Nancy Glass Wright, review of Psychic Connections, p. 181; April 1997, Delia A. Culberson, review of Gallows Hill, p. 28.

ONLINE

Lois Duncan Web site, http://loisduncan.arquettes.com/ (July 26, 2004).