bruns_rick's Full Review: I Know What You Did Last Summer
This huge date-movie hit and the sequel, "I Still Know," have only one redeeming element: they may lead you to read the book on which they are based.
Author Lois Duncan is genuinely horrified by the first screen version. "What I did not anticipate was that [my book] would be turned into a slasher film, with a teenage audience shrieking with frenzied delight," she emailed this reviewer. "My own teenage daughter was murdered in 1989, and, believe me, there's nothing funny about violent death."
Duncan had written the book, an award-winning modern classic that is widely taught in middle schools, many years before that tragedy. In the book, the secret the four teenagers are keeping pursues them more relentlessly than any Hollywood hook-wielding ghoul -- from within -- until they learn to accept responsibility for their actions.
The book draws the reader, teen or ex-teen, into a mysterious pattern of vengeful threats, beginning with the chilling note that is the book's title. Duncan gets inside the tormented Julie's head, clearly and without overwriting:
"For one crucial instant Julie wavered, torn by the temptation to step forward and throw herself into her mother's arms and weep out the whole dreadful story. What comfort there would be in letting it all out at last! To lean upon an adult shoulder, to cry, 'I have done an awful thing!' ... But she did not do it, stopped as much by the vulnerability of her mother's face as by the memory of the pact."
If, after reading "I Know What You Did Last Summer," you want a sequel, try Duncan's other novels, including "Killing Mr. Griffin," "Ransom," and "The Third Eye."
[Reviewer's note: Ms. Duncan and her family maintain a website for their slain daughter Kait at http://www.iag.net/~barq/kait.html/]
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