This realist young adult fiction novel was about an eighteen-year-old serial killer/rapist and the fifteen-year-old girl who falls in love with him. Eric has just been released from prison, and Lori has just run away from home (again) because her mother’s boyfriend has been feeling her up. Lori gets what she calls random “fixations” with different men; she sees them and feels an incredible urge to find them and kiss them, and then her fixation ends. Lori is pretty and is thus constantly being taken advantage of by men of various ages, something she’s learned to use to her advantage, but what she wants more than anything is someone to be tender to her. For Eric, tenderness means rape and murder. Tenderness means different things to both of them, but it’s related to sex for both adolescents. The novel’s sexual themes were really interesting to me, and I like how Eric and Lori shape each other’s lives. Furthermore, read one way, Lori becomes the archetypal innocent girl who is abused at every turn by sex-obsessed men who objectify and use her. I thought this idea was really interesting, and I like how Cormier called out the adults in both children’s lives who abused their children (in Lori’s case) and who failed to teach them correct principles and let them get away with way too much (in both Eric and Lori’s cases). So the idea that these teens are smart and know how to manipulate society to get what they want is important, and the fact that they manipulate weak adults so easily demonstrates that both adults and the society adults have set up is broken, and can’t do anything to help these teens. However, the novel’s ending kind of ruined it for me; I thought it was ridiculously melodramatic. Also, I never fully bought the character of Eric; he didn’t seem fully developed to me. This opinion might change on a second rereading, but for this reading, I thought this novel was more exploitation fiction than substantive fiction.