We Made the Pact – Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer

I Know What You Did Last Summer. Sure, I remember that one. It was a horror comedy from the nineties, right? And wasn’t it written by the guy who wrote Scream, Scream 2, and Scream 4? Yeah: Kevin Williamson. The dude who served as the showrunner for Dawson’s Creek and Vampire Whaddyacallit on the small screen (Odd but necessary tangent: Do people still call television the boob tube?). I Know What You Did Last Summer. It was a rather forgettable slasher picture with Buffy and the Ghost Whisperer. Oh, it was adapted from a novel, wasn’t it. Well, the book is probably just as forgettable, right?

Actually not so much.

Lois Duncan’s thriller is a slender volume, but a worthwhile read. Sure, it was targeted at “younger readers” but these days aren’t we all young at heart? If the trend for YA to hit bestsellers lists is any indication, then yes. Anyway, Duncan’s novel is a fascinating little slice of thrills-and-chills pie. First published in 1973, it feels like a solid piece of hardboiled fiction (with a cast in their tweenties).

It starts out a year after an unspecified but undoubtedly tragic incident, which has strained the relationships of four once-good friends to the breaking point. The incident is not revealed straightaway, but emerges slowly, a secondary source of suspense in this thriller. The primary source shows up front and center, however. It’s there in the first line of the book: “The note was there, lying beside her plate when she came down to breakfast.” That note is like the ticking time bomb in a Hitchcock flick. It’s bad news, and we know it, but the full payoff doesn’t hit until the end of Chapter One. The note contains a single sentence, and of course it’s a simple recitation of the book’s title.

This event triggers an unwelcome reunion of sorts. We meet the four protagonists:

Julie is pretty guilt ridden. She has cut all ties, turned her head toward study, and seeks only to escape the town by going away to university. In fact, the book opens with two notes, one offering hope (acceptance letter, woot!) and the other a haunting bit of guilt from the past.

Helen is a lovely girl, who managed to win a contest to appear regularly on local TV news. She’s the It girl for the small town, big news in a small pond. Sure, she’s pretty but she’s also shallow, though it will take some serious breaks to make her realize just how selfish she comes off as.

Barry Cox is a frat kid, popular and good-looking enough to play the role of life support system for his genitals. As the book opens, he is still “seeing” Helen (because hey, it’s one hell of a feather in the cap to be seen with such a popular conversation starter) but he’s ready to cut that off out of boredom.

Ray was Julie’s boytoy but after the incident, he dropped out of school, managed to dodge the draft and headed out of state for a year to learn about working on boats. He’s been seen back in town now.

As this reunion progresses, we get an inkling of the incident. The four chums took a trip to somewhere secluded, acted as stupid as teens often do, and then made the mistake of driving back home while under the effects of Bad Influences. On most nights, this would be uneventful; on the night in question, they found themselves involved in an automobile accident. They hit a weird dude in a peacoat—no, that’s the movie. In Duncan’s book they hit a kid on a bicycle. Yes, a ten year old boy who was pissed off enough at his “friends” to bike his way home from a slumber party at an ungodly hour. While this kid was sprawled on the road enduring the last miserable moments of his life, the four teenagers drove away, dropped an anonymous call to the cops, and then made a pact to never speak of the incident again.

As this unfolds, we also start to get a hint of growing paranoia. Someone is not content to send a single note. It soon turns into several anonymous accusations. And then the attention turns deadly. Could it be one of Julie’s former friends? A jealous family member? Will she identify the responsible party before it’s too late? (Cue appropriate suspense music: BUM BUH BAAAAAAAH!)

She can try, and the friends can find setbacks aplenty and some nicely done twists along the way. There is a pleasantly large cast of suspects to go through, with more showing up every few chapters. The material itself is pretty entertaining stuff and solidly written, but the really neat parts are in the subtext. Those unspoken assumptions from the time the book was written.

The Vietnam War is all over this novel, particularly in the psychological ramifications it had on the populace who went away to fight and those who remained stateside. Not only is this found in the omnipresent antagonist — here we have a killer who can hide in plain sight, someone who is knowledgeable enough in firearms to play sniper, someone who can pretend to be a friend before blowing your world apart – but in the broken teens and twenty-somethings.

This is a book about cruelty and guilt, about repression and compartmentalization. Ultimately, it grapples with responsibility and friendship. What chills the book offers arise more from psychology and bad decisions than from murderous antics. There’s a touch of Robert Bloch here, as well as a bit of Robert Cormier. In that way, this book and David Schow’s The Kill Riff (reviewed a few weeks back) mine similar veins: both center on characters with broken headspaces enmeshed in revenge stories (though this one is lower on the nihilistic spectrum than Schow’s work).

All told, Lois Duncan tells a mature, engaging story. The subtext adds some intriguing layers to what could have been a straight ahead thriller, making it far more memorable than the series of flicks it has inspired.

Speaking of which, isn’t it about time to remake the first one? 1997 was almost 20 years ago! Maybe such a production will stick closer to the source material (as with John Carpenter’s The Thing). That’d be killer.

This article copyright © 2016 by Daniel R. Robichaud.