Sentimental Education

In the prologue to Eric McCormack’s new novel, Cloud, the book’s narrator and protagonist, Harry Steen, recounts a tale that can scarcely be believed.

Steen discovers the story by accident. While attending a mining conference in the Mexican town of La Verdad—meaning “the truth”—he kills time one rainy afternoon in a used bookstore. A threadbare volume, The Obsidian Cloud: An Account of a Singular Occurrence within Living Memory over the Skies of the Town of Duncairn in the County of Ayrshire, catches his eye.

The book-within-the-book tells of a freak weather occurrence in 19th-century Duncairn, a small town in the southern Scottish highlands, when the afternoon sky suddenly turned completely black. Transformed into a polished obsidian mirror, it thus displayed the life of the terrestrial town on a celestial canvas, a perfect inversion of the Lord’s Prayer phrase, “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Nothing like it had ever been seen before in...