The Show That Smells

It's fitting that filmmaker Guy Maddin's review is so prominently featured on the cover of Derek McCormack's latest. These two have much more in common than their shared Canadian roots. Like Maddin's films, McCormack's wicked little novels are a style unto themselves; unlike anything else on the literary landscape. The Show That Smells manages to evoke the atmosphere of a grainy, sepia-tinted early talkie, while at the same time being nearly impossible to place in any particular time period. Written like a film treatment, replete with a cast of characters that includes country singer Jimmie Rodgers, fashion doyenne Coco Chanel, horror film star Lon Chaney as well as the author himself, it centers around some of McCormack's favorite themes - a troubled marriage, old school country music, vampirism and haute couture. All the action takes place in the fun house hall of mirrors, where the hypnotically repetitive prose manages to conjure the grotesque, yet campy, outlaw world of carnie life. Oh, and it's funny too. Pitch dark humor, to be sure, but funny as hell. After reading The Haunted Hillbilly I was eager to give the rest of Derek McCormack's work a try and this one did not disappoint. Wry, dry and pretty darned creepy. That's entertainment.

This book was a delicious, delicious surprise. I picked it up after reading the plot summary on Dennis Cooper's blog (the book is published by Cooper's "Little House on the Bowery" series). I expected a delightful, quirky and enjoyably subversive summer read. I was completely unprepared for what "The Show That Smells" really is: startling, funny, full of unexpected twists and morsels of horrific glee. It is almost a novel in verse, and reading it is more like the experience of watching an unusually wonderful contemporary silent film than anything else. It smells like Edward Gorey, Kathy Acker, Ed Wood, Guy Maddin, and Jean Genet all at once, but is really its own singular work full of punning vampire queens, sexual slapstick, Lon Chaney and righteous queer carnie power. I can't wait to read it again.