Welcome back to Books With Cause! Let’s dive into my latest review: I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan — the original 1973 YA thriller that inspired the 1997 slasher film, though the book itself tells a very different story.
Yes. This is the book that inspired the 1997 movie that starred Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar. However, if you’ve seen the movie and then pick up this book, the reading experience that follows won’t be the one that you expect.
Julie, Helen, Barry, and Ray are four high school seniors out on a late-night drive one night when they accidentally knock a boy off his bicycle. They were drunk and a little stoned, and they knew they shouldn’t have been driving in the first place. In an attempt to avoid the trouble they’ll get in for doing the right thing, they phone emergency services anonymously and then flee the scene. The boy dies, and the four teenagers make a pact that they’ll never tell anyone what happened.
Life carries on, and Julie’s excited about getting into her preferred choice of college. But the same day she receives her college acceptance letter, she also receives another curious item in the mail. An unbranded message in an envelope with no return address. A letter that simply says: I know what you did last summer.
And therein ends any real similarity between this 1973 young adult novel and the late 90s slasher. So imagine if you were Lois Duncan, who lived the experience the other way around. The version of the book I read was republished in 2010 with slight revisions by Duncan to modernise the story. But this copy also features an interview with the author where she describes her experience of going to the cinema to see the film only to be completely confused when she sees a mysterious fisherman with a large hook. “This isn’t my book,” she remembers saying at the time.
I think it’s safe to say she had mixed feelings on the matter. Duncan passed away in 2016, so we’ve no way of asking her now. But I imagine the money she must’ve made from the movie (and subsequent sequels) can’t have hurt, but at the same time, I can imagine it must’ve stung to find out in the way she did.
Focusing on the novel alone, while it isn’t a slasher, there’s still a lot of horror along the way. Our central characters are in constant threat, and they don’t know where it’s coming from because they don’t know who it is that knows their terrible secret. But whoever it is seems determined to get revenge by picking them off one by one.
If you’re anything like me, this book is worth picking up if you’re someone who’s seen the film and is curious where the idea came from. It’s also pretty short so it shouldn’t take too long to read. Beyond that, it has a few nostalgic feelings of simpler times.
My Goodreads Rating: ★★★☆☆ 3 stars
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