Cormier's fiction for young adults tends to push the edge of what society deems acceptable reading for them.

Tenderness pushes the edge very hard, the way the unrelenting cruelty and stripping away of young people's civil rights pushed the edge in The Chocolate War. Much of Cormier's writing is nightmarish, peopled with characters who have been abandoned by society and characters who are antisocial predators. Cormier also is noted for his experiments with structure and other elements of the novel. In the Middle of the Night has two distinct narratives similar to the ones in Tenderness—the first an account of a demented exacting of revenge by telephone and the second an account of a young person trying to hold himself together while under extreme psychological pressure.