I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan

Published in 1973, the story also has Vietnam vein running through it. I Know What You Did Last Summer, her most famous work, is ostensibly a revenge tale about teens under siege from a mysterious stalker.

She wrote stories about teen kidnapping, psychic powers encroaching on reality, witchcraft, feminism, murder, and revenge. Hinton empathised with the underdog, then Lois Duncan’s specialty was good old-fashioned suspense fiction. If Robert Cormier wrote bleak stories about corruption/hypocrisy, Paul Zindel tackled real world issues with sensitivity, Judy Blume the trials of teens, and S.E. They all had something lacked in character-building, they made up for in throat-grabbing storytelling. They wrote tight plots with rigid structure, each of these authors having their own style. They were talented storytellers who understood the mechanics of a good yarn. They were authors who found fame writing for young adults, but whose books gave you the sense that they were trying to put out something better than the expected cheap cash-ins aimed at kids. Overall, she became one of the doyens of American teen literature alongside Robert Cormier, Joan Lowery Nixon, Paul Zindel, S.E. She was a rarity in that her work was mostly excellent, with a few rare misfires. Not that Lois Duncan ever wrote fiction that critics disdained. Looked down on, these books were known back then as Juvenile Fiction.

Her books for young people were Young Adult before the genre became mainstreamed. Lois Duncan was a household name if your house was home to kids with library memberships in the 70s and 80s.

I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan