Heroes

Overview

Francis Joseph Cassavant comes home from the Second World War at eighteen with no face to speak of, hidden beneath bandages and a borrowed photograph of the boy he used to be. He carries a pistol, a Silver Star he isn't sure he deserves, and a single errand that has brought him back to his hometown.

That errand is Larry LaSalle, the once-beloved director of the local youth center, a man who taught Francis and his friends to dance, to dream, and to believe in themselves before enlisting and returning from his own tour of duty with an identical medal for valor. Francis intends to find him and kill him.

Cormier unspools the novel as a quiet reckoning, moving between Francis's wary present-day wandering through familiar streets and the buried memories that explain exactly why admiration curdled into this kind of resolve.

The Shape of a Lie

At its center, the novel asks an uncomfortable question: what does a medal actually prove? Francis's own award came from an act he can barely classify as courage rather than panic or luck, and that uncertainty forces him to reexamine every story he's ever been told about bravery, including Larry's. Cormier, known across his body of work for stripping away comforting illusions about authority and institutions, uses the mismatch between a town's public hero and its private truth to examine how easily charisma and performance substitute for actual decency, and how long a community will keep believing a flattering story once it's been told. The book sits among his bleaker, more interior novels, less concerned with plot mechanics than with the slow, corrosive work of disillusionment.

Why Heroes Has Been Challenged

Sexual abuse of a minor is the core content driving most objections to this book, alongside its wartime violence and a disfigured protagonist's open contemplation of murder and suicide. Readers and parents have questioned whether a novel built around an adult's exploitation of a child, even when handled without graphic description, belongs in school libraries or classrooms, and some have pushed back on its unresolved, morally ambiguous ending rather than a clear-cut moral lesson. The book has been challenged in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog, generally by those concerned that its subject matter is too disturbing for the age group most likely to encounter it on a school shelf.