“Why, when we take such care to disguise our true selves from others, would we expect them to be an open book to us?” Harry Steen, a businessman travelling in Mexico, ducks into an old bookstore to escape a frightening deluge. Inside, he makes a serendipitous discovery: a mid-nineteenth-century account of a sinister storm cloud that plagued an isolated Scottish village and caused many gruesome and unexplainable deaths. Harry knows the village well; he travelled there as a young man to take up a teaching post following the death of his parents. It was there that he met the woman whose love and betrayal have haunted him every day since. Presented with this astonishing record, Harry resolves to seek out the ghosts of his past and return to the very place where he encountered the fathomless depths of his own heart. With Cloud, critically acclaimed Canadian author Eric McCormack has written a masterpiece of literary Gothicism, a gripping, darkly imagined story about the nature of love in a world where menace hovers at every turn.

A masterpiece of the sexual gothic, this is the story of Andrew Halfnight, whose life, part dream, part nightmare, begins with a mother’s tragic choice and ends with a lover’s embrace. In between he experiences tempests at sea, on land and in the mind; and relatives who kill for love and lovers who sacrifice their bodies; as all the while he moves ever closer to the central mystery of his and all existence. First Blast is Eric McCormack at his finest.

Eric McCormack was born in a small village in Scotland. He moved to Canada in 1966 and attended the University of Manitoba. He taught English for more than thirty years at St. Jerome’s College at the University of Waterloo, specializing in seventeenth-century and contemporary literature. He has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Governor General’s Award. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Rachel, the mother of the aging professor Thomas Vanderlinden, shared her life with two men. Both went by the name of Rowland Vanderlinden. The first husband went abroad and never returned. The second, whom Rachel also unquestioningly accepted as her husband, was a mystery. In an attempt to understand his mother’s adventurous decisions regarding love and marriage, Thomas sets out on a journey to the far reaches of the Pacific to find the first Rowland, and his real father. As the mystery of the two Rowlands unfolds throughout the novel, so too does a fascinating portrait of one woman and the choices she makes. Set before a backdrop of fantastical places, The Dutch Wife is a profound meditation on the nature of love.

What young reporter could resist the opportunity to be the only journalist allowed into a town on which a news blackout has been imposed? When James Maxwell is invited to the town, he discovers the entire population is suffering from a strange and unnatural plague. Is a poisoner at work?

Learning of a horrifying family crime from his grandfather, journalist Ezra Stevenson tries to verify the story by tracking down four brothers and sisters, alleged victims of abuse. “Full of death and suffering, the novel exhilarates rather than depresses, its stark dourness vivifying rather than dulling the reading appetite,” concluded PW. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.