Eric McCormack

Eric Patrick McCormack (20 September 1938 – 9 May 2023) was a Scottish-born Canadian author. He was known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, gothic horror and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as Inspecting the Vaults (1987), The Paradise Motel (1989), The Mysterium (1992), First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1997) and The Dutch Wife (2002). Biography McCormack was born in Bellshill, Scotland, an impoverished industrial community located 32 kilometres outside Glasgow where his father worked in a steel mill. McCormack took a master's degree in English literature from the University of Glasgow, then taught at a high school in Muirkirk, Scotland, a mining town. In 1966, he went to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he wrote his PhD on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a text he frequently alludes to in his fiction. In 1970 he took up a teaching post in the English Department of St. Jerome's University, which was established in 1959 as St Jerome's College and has been federated with University of Waterloo since 1960. He has since retired from teaching there. McCormack wrote short stories in addition to his academic work, and in the 1980s published them in small literary journals such as Prism International, Malahat Review and The New Quarterly. His first book, Inspecting the Vaults, released in 1987, is a collection of these stories. One short story in particular, "Sad Stories in Patagonia", which describes a family tragedy, formed the basis of his next book, The Paradise Motel, which was published in 1989, and is mentioned in most of the other books that follow.