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.

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“Some books you wish would never end. So it is with Eric McCormack’s latest… [a] dark, rollicking fabulous story.” - Toronto Star
“Hair-raising, thrilling, blood-curdling and wholly satisfying…. This novel has the hypnotic fascination of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch … in which every imaginable perversity is rendered with lavish and scrupulous detail….First Blast raises the ante of gothic terror. A superb, finely spun yarn, it appeals to the darkest, most secret recesses of the imagination.” - The Financial Post
“An engrossing, redolent, very good book…. With Eric McCormack you always sense he’s tapped into something authentically dreadful; you can feel the oozing, putrid mud at the bottom of his metaphors.” - Saturday Night
“Wonderful … fantastic story-telling…. This novel is so much more than a thinking person’s thriller. It is a novel of imagination and the search for meaning in the face of tragedy. McCormack has written a terrific, engrossing story.” - Winnipeg Free Press
“A lavish and beautifully human novel, [First Blast of the Trumpet] creeps into the blood…. An utterly absorbing read.” - The Globe and Mail
“McCormack is an expert in the art of quiet treachery, in creating the fine unassuming line which sheathes the knife, in the shadowy craft of luring us into the torture chamber we secretly can’t resist, beckoning us to act on the desire to revel in the truly sadistic…. A damn good read.” - The Vancouver Sun
“First Blast is an ingenious celebration of human solemnity … a book artfully written for the thinking person, and that means each and every one of us.” - The Globe and Mail
“There’s a fairy-tale quality to First Blast, a Brothers Grimm for grown-ups who like an intelligent read with a bit of snap, crackle, pop.” - Georgia Strait
“[McCormack] is one of a kind … a unique literary voice…. First Blast celebrates the priority of imagination. It’s completely accessible and non-stop entertaining.” - Calgary Herald
“”Engrossing…. [McCormack] is a crackling good story-teller with an uncanny ability to expose the macabre underbelly of human nature.” - The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)
“McCormack’s postmodern metaphysical puzzle is also a marvelous yarn. It spins out in picaresque segments, each distinct, vivid, funny, and full of sighs and wonders.” - Quill & Quire
“One of Canada’s foremost new gothic pioneers.” - ID
“McCormack’s prose, on a purely sentence level is always unerring, often stunning…. First Blast is a novel that expertly sets its sights on an impressive assortment of truths.” - Books in Canada
“An impressive book, one that treats the reader as an intelligent, thinking creature, without being obtuse…. First Blast is a solid novel by a confident writer, moving smoothly and strangely through a man’s life and mind and his various disasters.” - The Ottawa X Press
“The power of invention is a rare thing and McCormack has tonnes of it.” - See Magazine
“McCormack writes beautifully.” - The Leader-Post (Regina)
“Reading McCormack is like wandering through a mansion with each room crammed to bursting with strange and terrible objects suggesting mysterious lands and arcane philosophies…. This novel is a pleasure to read and to read again. The story and the stories within reveal additional subtleties with each new visit.” - Edmonton Journal
“First Blast is a fun-house ride of a novel; an amusement park of childish nightmares and fears … an imaginative novel, straddling the twilight world where dream and reality merge and linger…. A novel of bizarre fantasy and imaginative, gothic terrors made casual, First Blast is a grown-up fantasy novel that will amuse any lover of the unusual, the supernatural and the paranoid.” - Telegraph-Journal (Saint John)