A powerful, sharply detailed story of creeping dread from one of the country's most daring and inventive novelists.

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 of Carrick, he discovers the entire population is suffering from a strange and unnatural plague. Is a poisoner at work?

 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

“Think of Borges, Michael Ende, Saki, Japan's Kobo Abe. Now think of Eric McCormack. Sharp, quirky, refreshingly unemotional and macabre.” —Time Out (London)

“It says much for Eric McCormack's narrative skill that one rapidly accepts the strange conditions of his particular and peculiar world.” —The Sunday Times