“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.

 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.

Eric McCormack's profile page

"Mysterious and beguiling, Eric McCormack's Cloud is a book about where books can take us. Enchantment awaits." - Andrew Pyper, internationally bestselling author of The Demonologist
“Cloud is a tale about many things—about the mysteries of the human mind and the human heart; about life as a sojourn of loss and regret; about the ways literature and life illumine each other. It's also a compelling read that will keep you turning pages into the depths of the night.” - Waterloo Regional Record
“Cloud is a powerful book by an author who takes chances . . . Dark, gripping, and filled with ghosts, Cloud is a late summer must-read.” - Owen Sound Times
"Eric McCormack is one of our most boldly original and entertaining writers . . . as our sole practitioner of what might be described as absurdist existential neo-Gothic fiction, he's in a genre all by himself . . . Cloud is undisputably his best novel to date." - National Post
"It is virtually impossible not to be caught up in the momentum of Cloud . . . readers will be delighted by it." - Globe and Mail
"Cloud is a fantastical book, equal parts mystery, gothic novel and fabulist invention within a framework of naturalistic fiction . . . McCormack is a postmodernist with a mischievously twisted metafictional bent. Elements of the absurd and existentialism make for cozy bedfellows." - Waterloo Regional Record
“Cloud has all the McCormackian hallmarks: insidious events, eerie details that jab like quills in a reader’s brain, and an omnipresent sense of crawling, creeping dread. You don’t always want to follow McCormack down the dark alleys on offer in this book, yet he is such an expert guide that you can’t help but be swept along, breathless (and sometimes flinching) towards the seething heart of Cloud’s mysteries.” - Craig Davidson, Author of Cataract City
“Imagine fabulous stories like stacking dolls. This is the seductive pleasure of the new and long awaited novel from Eric McCormack which ranges through a world that is sublimely macabre. But of all McCormack's fiction, the central question of Cloud grabs my heart as no other has: Isn't it strange what love can lead to?” - Kim Echlin, author of The Disappeared
"McCormack's descriptions of the darker, danker locations, combined with his ability to create that overbearing sense of impending doom that initially draws the reader in, are at times evocative of the best in gothic writing, from Edgar Allan Poe onwards." - Winnipeg Free Press