Inspecting the Vaults
,by Eric McCormack, is not in the Epinions database. Rather than mope over that fact, I thought I would give my thoughts here about Eric and this work, and invite other people to give brief reviews of similar books that they love (or hate).
My first impression of Eric McCormack was strong enough to forever colour the way I read his books. He is a rather short man, and has a thick bristly thatch of light grey hair, and a moustache not seen in these parts since the Victorian age. Eric was born in Scotland, and it is in his Scottish burr that I always hear his stories. I first heard him read in the Arts and Psychology building at the University of Waterloo, where he taught and was writer in residence at St. Jerome's College. He first read from his introduction to Inspecting the Vaults, where he describes growing up in a small Scottish town, where the receipt of a letter from abroad was a big deal. Eric retrieved the letter from his parents after they'd finished looking at it, and then charged other small boys in his village to look at it. As he described it, his first dealings with the written word were therefore prompted more by mercenary instincts than any love of art.
Inspecting the Vaults
is a collection of short stories, and if I could find the damn book, I'd list them. Instead, I'll just run through a few of the ones that stick out in my mind. All the stories are otherworldly, and have strong elements of the supernatural in them.
The title story's hero is the Inspector. He inspects vaults. The vaults are basement-like compartments underneath houses in a small village where various enemies of the state are housed. The inhabitants of these houses are paid a stipend by the state to feed the prisoners, (although I think they are not called prisoners but some other euphemism for prisoners, by regulation) and house them in a very rigidly prescribed manner. The Inspector has the ability to have their stipend taken away, so all the house owners are all cheery to his face, but secretly hate him. Each of the occupants of the vaults are described at length, and their crimes seem to be that they have sinned against conformity in some strange way. One of the occupants used to live at the centre of a forest in a strange house, where neighbours heard strange noises at all hours of day and night. When the state police were called in, they found that all the trees surrounding the house had been replaced with replicas. The fake trees were put to the torch, and replicas of animals came clanking out of the fake forest.
After the final occupant is inspected, the story ends with an uncanny description of how the Inspector got his job, and the terror of the unknowable grips you briefly before Eric moves on to the next story.
Sad stories in Patagonia is a story about stories. An expedition to darkest Patagonia gathers together several men. At night, they tell tales around a fire. After each story (there are 3 or 4 of them), the cook uses modern litcrit mumbo jumbo to praise or criticise the story. The final story is all I remember, of a family moving to a small town on an island. A doctor, his wife and three children live there for a bit, and then one day, the Doctor reports his wife missing. A search is made of the island, but the wife is not found. A few days later, the children take sick at school, and on examining the youngest daughter, large stitched incisions are found on her body. The older boys are found to have similar stitched incisions. As do the cats and the dog. The conclusion of this story is shocking, and satisfying.
Knox Abroad relates the journey to Canada of John Knox, founder of the Knox Presbyterian church. Although occasionally disgusting (the "curing" of a Native maiden of nymphomania), this story is usually hilarious ("Churches, Clootie, we must build churches. Churches with tall roofs and no rain gutters. Perhaps a church under a waterfall where people must walk through the water to enter the church" he tells his cat, Clootie (who he calls "Clootie ma wee man")). His dealings with the Natives are comic, with the explorers underestimating the savagery of them, and the Natives mocking the explorers, but ultimately overcome by microscopic diseases.
The Swath denotes a scientific phenomenon. On a specific day, at a specific time, a two mile wide gap opens up in the earth somewhere in Manitoba and begins moving at a certain speed on a path around the globe. Homes are cut in two, highways sliced in half, hundreds of thousands of people disappear when unable to get out of the way of the swath, and exceedingly strange events in the swath's path are witnessed shortly before they are swept up. Unicorns approach naked virgins and rub their horns against their arms. A chamber music trio plays a beautiful sonata never heard before or since. This story has magic in it, and is a lot of fun, despite reading like an early effort on Eric's part.
There are many other memorable stories in Inspecting the Vaults. Allusions to Henry Miller appear in one. An extended interior monologue answering questions on a questionnaire in another. A strange festival in a South American city is described in another. A village of one-legged miners and how they got that way. Many of these stories make appearances in later books. The Mysterium, Eric's next book, is an extension and commentary on Sad Stories in Patagonia.
Hilarious death and mysterious occurrences haunt these stories, and I want to find the damn book so I can read them all again!
Published by Penguin books in 1987.
Highly recommended.
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