40th Anniversary Review: Stranger With My Face
What happens when a sister you've never met tries stealing your life?
Stranger With My Face by Lois Duncan
Originally Published: October 1981
In the ten years since Lois Duncan published A Gift of Magic, we saw much more amazing work coming from her.
After A Gift of Magic, Duncan focused almost exclusively on young adult suspense novels throughout the 70s. A Gift of Magic was followed up by the much darker I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), where four teenagers accidently kill a boy after running him over with their car and decide to keep their involvement in the incident a secret, a decision which they pay a heavy price for a year later, although what happens to them differs greatly from what occurs in the 1997 movie many people are familiar with. This novel largely set the tone in which many of Duncan’s other teen thrillers followed suit, including Down A Dark Hall (1974), Summer of Fear (1976), the first of Duncan’s novels to be made into a movie when it was adapted into a TV movie by Wes Craven in 1978, Killing Mr. Griffin (1978), which became her most acclaimed novel at the time, and Daughters of Eve (1979).
As a result, it can be argued that Duncan was one of the most influential young adult writers of the 70s, combining the usual teen drama that’s common in so many YA novels of that decade with the terrifying scenarios found in the popular horror novels of the time. Perhaps it’s no accident that both young adult and horror fiction increased so much in popularity during the 70s.
This can be seen well enough in her 1981 novel Stranger With My Face, where a teenage girl discovers she has a twin sister, who has been trying to connect with her through astral projection.
In the first chapter, Laurie Stratton introduces herself and tells readers about her life, stating that this is a written record of the unusual things that happened to her in the past year. We find out she lives with her family at the Cliff House in Brighton Island. Her father’s a science-fiction writer and her mother’s an artist, and she also has two siblings, Neal and Megan.
However, Laurie claims she also lives with someone else. It’s been a long time since she’s last seen this other person, but she can still feel their presence at times. She claims she’s no longer afraid of this person, but what she went through with them has caused her to feel uncomfortable in the home she used to love so much. She’s now planning to leave the island, and she’s writing this story because she thinks it’s the best way to leave these memories behind.
We flash forward to one year earlier, when Laurie catches the flu and misses a party where her boyfriend Gordon and the popular kids from school were going to be present. After many years feeling awkward within her own body and spending most of her time reading, she’s gotten closer to the popular crowd after she started dating Gordan, and she’d spent much of the summer swimming, sailing, and attending dances and beach parties, which is why she feels bad about missing this party.
She’s well enough to attend the first day of school, and like the other kids on the island, she gets to school through a ferry. While there, she notices Gordon speaking with Natalie, whose father is the owner of the Brighton Hotel (where the party from the day before was held), and who’d been Gordon’s prom date before he’d started dating Laurie. When she tries talking to them and their friends, no one acknowledges her at first. Then Natalie says she missed out on a great party, and Laurie says they wouldn’t have wanted her in the condition she was in. Gordon seems skeptical about what she says, explaining that when he’d gone out during the band intermission, he saw her on the beach. Laurie insists she wasn’t there, but Gordon doesn’t believe her, thinking she was probably spending time with another guy. Laurie is shocked by what he accuses her of and says that if he saw someone on the beach, it wasn’t her.
This is the first in a series of events where Laurie not only starts growing further apart from Gordon and the popular crowd, but also starts becoming aware of this unusual person who shows up in random places and causes those she knows to think it’s her.
The other incident occurs when Laurie gets home later in the day and her brother Neal asks if she just came in from outside. When Laurie says yes, he demands to know how she could have gotten there since he thought she was upstairs. Laurie tells him he should already know she had gone to school because she was in the ferry at the same time as he was, and Neal says he’d told their dad the same thing, but he said she might have started feeling sick again and have come back home because he claimed she’d kept going up the stairs to her room.
Hearing that this person is probably in her room causes Laurie to panic and head over there. She finds everything in there as it had been before. However, the feeling that someone else was there remains strongly within her:
“She had crossed the room to stand in front of that shelf and read the titles. How did I know this? She had moved from there to the bed and seated herself on it and reached out her hand to run it over the surface of the pillow. The spread was smooth and taut. There was no indentation to show that someone had rested there. But I knew. I knew.”
When her mother enters her room, Laurie tells her she thinks someone has been in her room and going through her things. At first, her mother thinks she’s assuming it was one of her siblings who’s done it, and Laurie says she’s not accusing them; she believes it’s another person who’s doing this. She can’t get herself to say she thinks it’s someone who looks like her that’s doing this. Her mother takes it all easy, continuing to think it may have just been Neal who’d gone in her room.
In the evening, Laurie goes outside and finds Gordon waiting outside for her. He tells her that whatever she was doing last night was okay, and that he has no right to give her a hard time about it when he was spending time with Natalie around the same time. When Laurie asks Gordon if he’s in love with Natalie, he responds by saying of course not; he’d been with her because he’d just been stood up by his girlfriend. Laurie is upset over how he still doesn’t believe her side of the story, but when Gordon asks if she’s still his girl, Laurie says yes because despite the way he’s been acting, she still wants to be with him.
She later has a dream where she falls into water and someone’s swimming beside her. At first, she thinks it’s Gordon, but she soon notices that this person moves and rests at the same time she does. Upon getting a good look at her, she notices a woman with long black hair and worried eyes.
When Laurie opens her eyes, she seems to be back in her room, since she hears a voice behind her bed which says the following:
“‘You do hear me, though, do you?’ The voice asked, and although I knew I had never heard it before, it was as familiar to me as my own.
‘Are you the one with my face?’ I whispered.
‘I came first,’ she answered with a little laugh. It’s you who have my face.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked her.
‘You must know that. We are the two sides of the same coin. We floated together in the same sea before birth. Didn’t you know I would be coming for you one day?’”
The next day, which is almost as troublesome as the day before, Laurie becomes aware of this person’s presence once again. She manages to speak with her once again, demanding to know what the person’s name is, and she responds by saying, “I am Lia. I am your sister.”
This new information leaves Laurie astonished. As far she knows, the only sister she has is Megan. She looks a little different from her, being plump with blonde hair and freckles while Laurie is thin with dark hair and somewhat darker skin, but she’s always accepted her as her sister. However, she can’t accept this other unusual person whom she only knows because she keeps seeing and sensing her as a sister.
Later, Laurie asks her parents if she has a twin. They admit they’d adopted Laurie back when they were struggling artists and having trouble having children of their own. After being turned down as adoptive parents in New York, they tried again in the Southwest, where they heard there were several babies of mixed race available for adoption. Laurie’s birth mother had been Navajo, while her biological father was white and had walked out on her mother at some point during her pregnancy.
She’d given birth to identical twins, and when Laurie asks why she was chosen instead of Lia, her father says they couldn’t have raised them both because of much they were struggling back then. Her mother further explains that when she first picked Laurie up as a baby, she didn’t want to let her go since it felt as if she was meant to be their daughter. However, when she picked up Lia, she says “She felt alien in my arms. I knew I would not be able to love her.”
When Laurie demands to be allowed to find her twin, her parents are against it, with her mother saying they never wanted to let her know because they knew Laurie would want to find out too much about someone who wasn’t even anything to her anymore. This upsets Laurie, and she tries explaining how she found out about Lia in the first place, but her parents don’t believe her. Her mother gets upset over Laurie’s behavior while her father tries to settle things between them, thinking that Laurie’s acting this way because of how shocked she is over this news, and tells her that the important thing is that despite how she’s adopted, they still love her.
And despite how angry Laurie is at her parents, she knows this is true.
Sometime later, Laurie manages to get in contact with Lia once again, even managing to have full conversations with her. Lia tells Laurie more about their birth mother, including how she’d had to marry the son of a chief when she was only thirteen. At the age of seventeen, a trader came to the village, and their mother fell in love and ran away with him. However, after a couple months together, he got tired of her and asked her to return to her village. Their mother refused, letting him know that she was pregnant, but this did not persuade him to stay with her. He ended up leaving her alone in their apartment, leaving behind some money and a note demanding she give up the baby for adoption.
Of course, the baby turned out being the two twin girls, and on account of them being mixed race, the adoption agency their mother went to for help ends up classifying them as “hard to place”. They asked if she could not have her family help raise the girls, but she said that if the village found out she had “half -breed” children, they would drive her out, especially since she was already married to a chief. The adoption agency decided to go ahead with finding families for them. Laurie ended up being adopted by her parents, while no one adopted Lia. Her mother raised her alone for several years, all while trying to find their father using the same method Lia was using to get in contact with Laurie. But one day, her mother never returned to her, and Lia ended up being placed in foster care.
However, Lia refuses to tell Laurie anything about her personal life or where she’s currently living. Instead, she tries on several occasions to get Laurie to improve her ability to reach her through her mind. Laurie tries but is never as successful at it as Lia is. Lia soon gets frustrated with her over this and stops appearing to her frequently.
But despite not seeing Laurie as much as she was before, Lia continues intruding in Laurie’s life by trying to harm the few friends she has left.
Throughout the beginning of the novel, Laurie starts becoming friends with a new girl in school named Helen Tuttle, who’s tall, freckled, and has recently transferred from the southeast. The two of them start out by having lunch together several times and grow close over time. She finds out that her parents used to be teachers at a boarding school at a Navajo reservation in Arizona, so she understands a lot about Navajo customs. When Laurie confides in her over what’s been happening to her, Helen becomes interested and asks Laurie if she had been using astral projection, explaining that it’s when someone sends their mind out of their body. She claims her old boyfriend from the reservation, Luis, had told her his father had been able to do this. She explains the process like this:
“It’s like the soul leaving the body when you die. It lifts and goes, right? Except that with astral projection you’re not dead. The soul or mind or whatever you want to call it-the identity part of you-is focused away, just for a short while, and then comes back.”
In fact, when Helen spends the night at Laurie’s place, she manages to feel Lia’s presence for herself. Once the girls go to bed, Laurie hears Helen calling out her name and demanding she back off. She thinks Helen’s probably having a nightmare, but she claims to have been wide awake the whole time and seeing a girl who shared Laurie’s exact features, but with very frightening eyes. The way she saw it, the eyes were pure evil, and when Lia had gotten closer, Helen thought she was going to kill her. She instantly believes Laurie’s claims about Lia, and that her presence is bad news. She discourages Laurie from trying to get in further contact with her, but Laurie ignores these warnings at first.
Helen remains the person Laurie is closest to for a while, with very few others showing interest in her. At one point, Laurie introduces Helen to the more popular girls, and it turns out being a mistake because they instantly judge Helen based on her appearance and the fact that she’s not from New England. Gordon doesn’t like her either and even objects to having Helen coming over to Laurie’s place because it means Laurie can’t go see a movie with him.
The only other person who shows interest in Helen is Jeff Rankin, a boy who had once been handsome and always spending time with girls when he visited the island during the summers until an accident with a lighter fluid occurred which left part of his face disfigured. After this happened, he stayed on the island with his divorced father, but remained isolated from the other kids, usually sitting by himself during the ferry ride to school. On the occasions when he speaks to Laurie, he often comes across as cynical, but he appears to understand the negative influence Gordon has over Laurie, even telling her that “Everybody knows he’s got you on a string.” However, when he speaks with Helen, he comes off as more friendly than usual, and she starts spending time with him on certain occasions.
One night around December, Jeff and Helen go out together with the intention of seeing a movie. After a while, Jeff sends Helen home on a taxi. However, she never makes it home, and she is later found lying unconscious around the park.
When Laurie and her mother go to the hospital to see Helen, they aren’t able to do so, so they speak with Helen’s parents, who let them know what’s happened. Mr. Tuttle remains mostly calm as he speaks with them, but Mrs. Tuttle is very devastated over the incident. She is quick to blame Jeff over Helen’s unusual accident, saying there’s no reason she would have been out in the park so late at night otherwise and that even if her daughter was a “late bloomer”, she shouldn’t have settled with someone like Jeff, whom she describes as “a boy who looks like the devil himself” and assumes that because of all that’s happened to him, he’s probably willing to take it out on others like her daughter. And since Jeff is still around in the waiting room, she refuses to let him come see them because she thinks he has no business being there.
When Laurie and her mother speak with Jeff later, he seems to assume he’s responsible for Helen’s accident. Mrs. Stratton tries telling him he couldn’t have guessed what would happen to her when he sent the taxi over for her, but Jeff goes further into what went on that night, explaining that Helen had wanted to see something at a store, and because of this, they had to do everything later than they originally planned, so he it would be practical to get a taxi for her because he had to get on the last ferry to get home on time.
The three of them leave the hospital together, and that night, Laurie hears Lia telling her to hold fast to her because she’s her only friend left. This probably should have been interpreted as an admission that she’d somehow caused Helen’s accident and a warning of what was yet to come. However, because Laurie sleeps more peacefully after hearing this, she doesn’t make too much out of what she told her.
Helen doesn’t recover anytime soon, and they later find out her parents intend to transfer her over to Duke Hospital, where there are specialists that could give her further help. Laurie then finds out from Jeff that when Helen had gone to the store on the day of the accident, she’d gone to a second- hand shop where they were selling books on astral projection, and she’d told him she wanted them because she had a friend who was into that type of thing. Because Jeff has spent some time going over the books, he understands more about the process and has somehow figured out that Laurie’s the friend Helen had wanted the books for. He decides to give her the books on Christmas Eve, agreeing to spend dinner with her family.
However, once the day comes, Jeff does not arrive at all. Her family thinks he probably stood her up, but Laurie has a feeling something happened that caused him to miss the dinner. A call from Pete Rankin, Jeff’s father, on Christmas Day confirms Laurie’s suspicions.
She and Neal go out to search for him, and she soon starts to sense he might be around a part of the beach where there are slick, dark rocks which are too dangerous to try walking around. She finds herself heading over there after having returned home. She manages to find the two books Jeff had intended to give her, leading her to go to the beach into the area where the rocks are. It gets increasingly harder to get around, and Laurie soon feels as if she’s hanging motionless in empty air, plunging down between two rocks into an area that Megan likes calling the Mermaids’ Caverns.
Upon regaining consciousness, she finds Jeff by her side, who finds it hard to believe that she’s there. He’s been stuck there almost all day, having possibly broken his leg when he fell. He’s afraid they probably won’t be able to get out, but Laurie assures him she believes her parents will eventually find them. When she asks to know what happened, Jeff says he thought he saw her walking through the cavern. Laurie clarifies that it was someone named Lia, and Jeff doesn’t express any doubt, as he’s feeling exhausted on account of not getting any sleep while he’s been down here.
After a while, Laurie feels herself soaring up, as if she’s flying through the sky. She manages to see Neal riding around on his bicycle, looking at ease until he suddenly stops for a while and calls out her name. He lets the bike fall as he runs back towards the house. Then she hears her name called out again, this time by a more desperate voice. She doesn’t know who it is at first, but upon realizing who it is, it brings her back to the rocks, where she hears Jeff saying, “Don’t die and leave me!”, to which Laurie replies, “I won’t. I’m back. It’s all okay.” She later figures out that as she’d had this experience, her body had gotten so still that Jeff had thought she’d possibly died, which often happens when someone uses astral projection.
They are rescued not long after and are taken to a hospital. Laurie goes through a period where she experiences strong pain on her shoulder, while Jeff ends up having a fractured leg. Once she recovers, Laurie starts reading the books Jeff gave her and finds out more on astral projection and some of the studies that have been done on the process. Things go better for a while. She’s not as isolated as she was during the fall and early winter, she and Jeff become close friends, and she stops hearing from Lia for months.
However, Lia performs one final act of revenge in which she remains in Laurie’s body while Laurie is left in a wandering state for several months. During that time, she gets back with Gordon, who’d broken up with Laurie towards the middle of the year, rejects Jeff’s company, and acts rather cruel towards Laurie’s family, especially Megan.
However, Laurie can now use astral projection on her own, and she finds out several important things as she uses it. She finds out Helen had finally recovered from the accident, but that she’s been left with no memories of her time in Brighton Island. She also finds the last foster family Lia stayed with, consisting of a couple that now lives alone and is grief stricken from the loss of a daughter. She discovers Lia had a difficult time settling down in the many foster homes she was in, and when she stayed with this family, she’d seemed fine for a while, but then she appeared to become afraid of getting too attached to them. She ended up causing her foster sister to die in a horse- riding accident, which led to her being committed to a mental institution. Laurie manages to see the place where she’s staying and discovers that she remains motionless throughout most of the day, meaning she probably uses astral projection nearly all the time to escape the bleak reality she’s been sentenced to.
Lia soon performs one final act of revenge in which she remains in Laurie’s body while Laurie is left in a wandering state for a while. During that time, she gets back with Gordon, who’d broken up with Laurie towards the middle of the school year, rejects Jeff’s company, and acts rather cruel towards Laurie’s siblings, especially Megan.
Eventually, Megan starts noticing how Laurie isn’t acting like herself, and based on some of the things she’s noticed before about Laurie, she figures out what’s going on with her sister. With some help from Jeff, they somehow manage to get Lia’s spirit out of Laurie’s body, and Laurie is soon herself once again.
Towards the end, Laurie’s father gets the news that Lia had recently died, with her body being cremated. However, based on what Laurie’s already said, Lia’s spirit seems to have remained in a permanent wandering state, since she can still feel her presence sometimes because she supposedly moves through the halls and speaks to Laurie in her dreams. Upon getting the news from her father, Laurie wonders if Lia’s now gone for good, or if her spirit will continue lingering around. However, she’s still determined to move on by heading off to college that month, which she views as a new phase of her life that is about to begin.
It's fair to say this is a more intense and chilling read than A Gift of Magic is. Based on the slightly more frightening scenarios, the things the characters say and do (with some minor swearing and drinking here and there), and the themes which are explored, it’s clear this is a novel aimed towards teenagers and not older elementary school kids.
Although A Gift of Magic is notable for including divorce as part of the story, the subject went on to become a prominent theme in other children’s and young adult novels during the 70s, to the point where this story may seem slightly identical to other books from that time. With Stranger in My Face, we get several subjects which were somewhat less common at the time, including adoption and foster care, the lives of Native Americans in the contemporary US, and the experiences of those who are mixed race or disfigured. And I can’t name even one other young adult novel of the time that attempted looking into astral projection. That should be enough to make this novel stand out from the rest.
Also, in A Gift of Magic, although Nancy does test her powers out on her own several times, she’s never left completely to her own devices for very long, and her family is aware of her powers and at least some of the struggles that come with it. In this novel, not only are Laurie’s parents incapable of helping out their daughter much, they also have no idea about her powers, and when she tries telling them what Lia is doing to her, they refuse to believe her. When Laurie does get help, it’s from her friends, who go on to face life threatening incidents simply for sticking by her side. Even towards the end, it’s her little sister Megan who helps save the day rather than her parents. If this isn’t a sign of the extent to which the young people in this story are left to their own devices, I don’t know what is.
At the same time though, this novel can’t really be considered the same as the more gruesome horror novels and movies that were everywhere in the 70s and 80s. We don’t have some freaky monster hunting down teenagers with an axe, a haunted house which is doing some unthinkable things to its current residents, or some wild animal devouring any human that gets in its way here. The way the characters in this story are attacked is almost hard to explain; Lia appears to do much of her dirty work telepathically, and damaging people using the strength of her own mind seems to come as easily to her as visiting Laurie from miles away. It’s chilling to read and think about, but the process is far from the gruesome ways of attacking others we see in more hardcore horror.
And as you may have already noticed, there aren’t many deaths in this novel. It could have been easy to make this story like the many teen slashers of the early 80s where almost all the teenagers face bloody deaths at the hands of inhuman killers except for the one brave final girl who manages to kill the monster in the end. It could have been reasonable to assume Helen never awoke from that coma Lia put her in, that Jeff would have been left stranded on those rocks until he died of either strong pain or starvation, or that Laurie would have been gone for good after being vanished from her own body.
But such is not the case for any of these characters. Although it is sad that Helen will remain without any memories of her friendship with Laurie, at least she still has a chance of moving on with her life and won’t be left traumatized by her horrific experience with Lia.
Jeff, who already survived a life- threatening experience before, is lucky enough to be found by Laurie and eventually rescued, and even goes on to help Laurie return to her own body. These experiences, on top of having to live with being disfigured and scapegoated on several occasions, seem to make him the story’s ultimate survivor. At the end of the story, we’re told that he went to Boston for a surgery which is supposed to improve his appearance, meaning he’s been given a chance to move on as well. I think this novel deserves a lot more recognition for featuring a disfigured character, which isn’t always seen in young adult literature, and showing how easily they can be treated like pariahs by society simply for their disturbing appearances, while also letting readers know they’re just as normal as anyone else and not just freaks which are beyond our understanding.
As for Laurie, she is left in a wondering state for a while, but she soon gets back to her own body and is preparing to leave Brighton Island for good towards the end of the story. Even the horrible Lia doesn’t seem to have a clear fate. She appears to be sentenced to a wandering state forever based on what Laurie tells us towards the beginning, but with the news of her body’s death at the end of the story, it’s hard to tell for sure what happens to her later. Could she be gone for good after this, or will her evil spirit continue to live on? We may never know for sure.
Some would argue that seeing more death would have made this a better horror story, but I don’t think making a story scary should always require sacrificing the characters. Just seeing how Laurie is still haunted by either the presence or memory of Lia shows she hasn’t gotten over all the horror from her life yet. The process of having to move on from a horrific incident can come across as just distressing as a final bloody showdown for some readers because some of them may have already experienced something similar in their own lives, even if it wasn’t as scary as an evil twin taking over their body. Such realistic experiences should have every place in horror and suspense novels as death does.
Likewise, some may take issue with the way Native American culture is linked with supernatural practices in this book, or the way Lia, who spends part of her childhood with her Native American mother and the rest of it in foster homes, turns out being the “evil” twin while Laurie, who is adopted by a well-off white family, is the “good” twin. At first glance, this may seem enough to dismiss this as another outdated 80s teen novel.
But as with some other books I may eventually review, I think if we take a deeper look into the themes explored in this novel, there’s much to be appreciated over the way difficult issues are presented in the book. We learn that mixed race babies were once considered difficult to adopt, and it was most likely because of the racist attitudes people still had during the 60s, which is probably when the girls were born based on the book’s publication date. We also get a glimpse into what happened to women who became pregnant out of wedlock back then, as we saw when we learned that the girls’ biological father had no interest in staying with their mother even when he found out he’d gotten her pregnant and how she would have gotten thrown out of her village if she were to return home.
Also, Lia isn’t automatically dismissed as an evil character who deserves no sympathy. Throughout the book, despite all the creepy ways in which Lia tries to connect with her, Laurie still wants to get to know her sister, and gets angry when her parents think this is unnecessary. She even tries improving her use of astral projection because she sees this as a way of remaining in touch with this sister she barely knows. And when she discovers later that Lia has been hospitalized, she says, “Surprisingly, this conjecture brought me no pleasure,” meaning that despite everything Lia has been doing to her, she still feels some sympathy for her.
The strongest evidence against Lia being completely evil may be how she expresses fear over not being wanted by her foster family. This could lead us to believe at least some of her actions were motivated by insecurities caused by how no one has ever remained in her life permanently, causing her to become hostile towards those who try getting close to her.
When she starts getting in touch with Laurie, we can assume she becomes jealous to see this sister of hers has a loving family and an active life of her own while she has none of these things. She seems to show some interest in forming a true connection with her sister, as we see when she encourages Laurie to improve her use of astral projection. However, her resentment over Laurie’s advantages prevents her from forming a positive connection, and as a result, she acts with as much hostility towards Laurie as she has towards others in her life who tried getting close with her, and rather than forming a loving bond with Laurie, she tries stealing her life.
Does any of this excuse Lia’s actions? Absolutely not. However, it does help readers understand what her motives are, and that we can’t just easily dismiss her as a monster. Likewise, Laurie doesn’t always come across as an amazing person either. She seems a little too desperate to remain in good standing with the popular crowd at the beginning of the story, even wanting to remain with a jerk like Gordon despite how he looks down on her so many times. The difference between the two girls, however, comes across when Laurie comes to accept those who try helping her out and how she can’t completely dismiss her family even when they refuse to believe her about Lia, while Lia pushes away those who reach out to her and doesn’t try changing for the better even when she’s in Laurie’s body.
With all this said, I certainly recommend reading this novel if you’re able to find it. Start it for all the suspenseful parts, and finish it for all the brilliant insights you’ll get as you read on.
I've never read this one either and it does sound really ground-breaking! Have you ever read Wonder by R.J. Palacio? It's been several years since I've read it, but it's wonderful.