Cormier's fiction often explores the psychology of misfits and unhappy people, even including people who are downright evil. His fiction also has the disturbing quality of giving evil characters deep-seated and plausible motivations for what they do. Cormier also is an experimenter who tries out new ways of presenting and organizing his plots. In In the Middle of the Night has two narrative strands; Cormier utilizes this same technique of presenting a narrow view with a first-person narrative and a broad view in a thirdperson narrative in the 1997 novel Tenderness. The technique is somewhat more effective in the latter novel, creating a breath-taking rush of events at the end of the narrative.