In two justly admired novels, "The Chocolate War" and "I Am the Cheese," Robert Cormier has dealt with the betrayal of youth, creating landscapes familiar but unnervingly strange—as in a di Chirico painting—in which one sees a boy in mid-adolescence, exceptionally decent and sensitive, standing alone as invisible forces gather against him.

The betrayals themselves, perpetrated by the elders who were by nature designed to be the boy's strength and support, are breaches of trust that lead to the extinction of trust and the spirit it fires. Parents, teachers, mentors, Mr. Cormier makes plain, can each have their own self-serving need to manipulate the young people in their charge, and when they act on that need the consequences can be deadly.

Presented in narrow focus, never moralizing, written in a lean and graphic prose that creates great tension, the novels provided an experience that this reader cannot shake off. The images and ethical questions they raised are still fresh and troubling, and provided an emotional background for the reading of Mr. Cormier's new book, "After the First Death."

Here, fixing on the same theme of betrayal, the author widens his focus. A busload of small children on their way to a New England day camp is hijacked by a gang of what we may surmise from the few clues offered is one of the more bloodthirsty adjuncts of the Palestine Liberation Organization. From different points of view we watch the events, minute by minute, until the climax; the pressure mounts steadily until it seems enough to blow the eardrums. (pp. 30-1)

In this small epic of terrorism and counter-terrorism and their consequences, Mr. Cormier pulls no punches. The brutality is all there, the intimations of sexuality in the young, the sour judgments of values by their elders, whose values have been rotted by political cant—all are presented without sermonizing in a marvelously told story. "After the First Death" more than sustains the reputation its author has won with "The Chocolate War" and "I Am the Cheese"; it adds luster to it.

Putting all three books together, one disturbing aspect becomes clear: Their basic theme, no matter how brilliant the variations on it, suggests unrelieved despair. The world of Mr. Cormier's people is a Dantean Inferno without any hint of Purgatorio or Paradiso. This is, of course, an antidote to the mindless Happy Ending school of literature but, like most such medicine, it does leave a bitter taste in the mouth. (p. 31)