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Mysterium

TELLING THE TRUTH IS ONLY POSSIBLE WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW VERY MUCH.

What young reporter could resist the opportunity to be the only journalist allowed into a town on which a news blackout has been imposed? A town rumoured to be experiencing something so mysterious, so horrible, that the world cannot be allowed to watch?

When James Maxwell is invited to observe such a phenomenon, he bravely agrees. What he finds is the dying and the dead, an entire population suffering from a strange and unnatural plague. Is it possible that every one of the townsfolk have been poisoned?

At the heart of the mystery is the local pharmacist, Aiken. He is responsible for summoning young Maxwell to Carrick. He offers motives, explanations, stories, questions. But could he also be guilty of this heinous crime?

Maxwell soon realizes that, although a great violence is being done to Carrick, the town itself hides from its own secrets — events from long ago and truths hidden from outsiders at all costs, even their lives. Maxwell interviews the final survivors who are suffering from a disease characterized by a barely recognizable but nonetheless identifiable odour, and a garrulousness unusual in such taciturn people, long accustomed to keeping secrets. yet their confessions lead constantly to more questions and always back to Aiken. As one who knows him well queries, "He's like a stick in water. Is he bent or not?"

In The Mysterium, Eric McCormack's second novel, the nature of truth is found to be as deadly as the poison killing the people of Carrick. For at the heart of everything, at the heart of every story and every truth, there is only the mystery.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 272
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780670845538
  • Genres
  • fiction, canada, mystery
  • Release date
  • 1992