Robert Cormier :: Fade

Isn’t it weird when, after weeks of wracking your brain to come up with an author’s name, or a book you once read, somehow the answer appears to you in the strangest of places?

Anyway…without giving you the weird backstory of how all this came to be and why I was reading books like this at such a young age, I’ll just say that Robert Cormier’s Fade has stayed with me for the last 15 years. I read it after several others (like the banned The Chocolate War, its follow-up, I Am the Cheese, We All Fall Down, etc.), but Fade was the novel that got my young mind thinking about corruption and the general notion that things are not always how they seem. I suppose you could say it was one of the first books that ever made me question my trust in the goodness of human beings.

I can’t say I’d ever read Fade again; some of Cormier’s books put images in my head that I’ve never been able to get out. But if you’re looking to satisfy your curiosity of becoming invisible, you might want to take a look.

Did any of you read Cormier’s books growing up? I seem to recall being the only one in my class who read his stuff and I never had anyone to talk about it with. Now I’m looking for some dialogue.

(A mighty thanks to Jezebel, an entertainment blog I seldom read, for writing the Cormier book review (on The Chocolate War) that brought this month-long internal saga of mine to a close.)