IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT by Robert Cormier. 182 pages, Delacorte.
"He had been 11 years old when he'd found out that his father had been involved in a tragedy in which 22 children died . . . startled to see his father's picture in the newspaper . . . as the cruel words leaped from the page . . . bomb threats to his home, harass ing telephone calls, hate mail."
Now, five years later, Denny's life is still surrounded with the harassing telephone calls that come mysteriously in the middle of the night.
He often wondered why he was told to never answer the phone and why he couldn't apply for a driver's license. He was a misfit in the schools and changed schools in midyear. The family never stayed in one city long enough to get acquainted.
When Denny finally makes friends with an assistant manager of a store and does answer the phone to hear a sultry woman's voice, he realizes he is in the middle of the torment his father has had for 25 years, being attacked by the survivors of the accident. He decides to accept the caller's invitation to a Halloween-night meeting, thinking that he could find the answer to the nightmare for his family.
Robert Cormier has done it again!
With a plot as circular and tight as a corkscrew, Cormier has wrapped the characters and events around and around with delicious mystery, leaving the reader in a "can't-put-the-book-down" mode.
Cormier did the same thing with "The Chocolate War" (1974), "I Am the Cheese" (1977) and nearly a dozen other novels of suspense. He developed some of the most fearsome events imaginable with teenagers (usually boys) facing reality. Reality. That's what Cormier calls the situations the characters need to face: "Not to face them is to live in a never-never land where struggle and growth and the possibility of triumph are absent."
Cormier's novels are met with love/hate reviews, some critics praising them and others lam-bast-ing them with venomous statements that lead to censorship. He is accused of filling the plots with brutality, betrayal, sadism, corruption (religious and governmental), insanity, murder, torture and suicide. And it's true. Cormier does not mince words or handle the brutal themes with kid-gloves. If the victim shakes with fright, he says so. If the antagonist is a heinous creature, he uses adjectives dripping in grime and blood.
What makes the books even more enticing is that the author is nothing like the things he writes about. "The name on the novels is Robert Cormier, and my name is Robert Cormier. But sometimes I don't recognize myself, either in . . (reviews) about my work or when I face questions from an audience about the violent nature of the books that bear my name.
"Look at me: I cry at sad movies, long for happy endings, delight in atrocious puns, pause to gather branches of bittersweet at the side of a highway."
Cormier admits to being shamelessly sentimental. "I aspire to be Superman . . . I hesitate to kill a fly, but people die horrible deaths in my novels."
In his novels, Cormier follows the logical means to an end. Kate Forrester in "After the First Death" was a sweet, real person but logically the inevitable happened and she died, making the reality fit in with the story line. In "I Am the Cheese," Adam Farmer was a victim of the times in which he lived. It was the reality that makes Cormier's novels so compelling and to many, mad-den-ing.
In "In the Middle of the Night" Denny Colbert's wish to find the reason for his father's 25-year penance to the victims - even though he was never charged with a crime - is a real situation. Some people do carry a load of remorse and guilt for a long time. Denny's father is tormented by it, and the reader feels it strongly. It's real. It's what Cormier strives for and achieves time and time again in his novels.
Marilou Sorensen is professor emerita of education at the University of Utah.