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“Derek McCormack’s cruel and unusual novella is the only ticket you’ll need to buy this year...The Show that Smells reeks of genius and is the author’s most original work to date...his trim, vicious sentences make Gordan Lish look verbose and chubby in comparison.”
Derek McCormack’s cruel and unusual novella The Show That Smells is the only ticket you need to buy this year. Framing the work as a lost Tod Browning film, McCormack deploys era personalities — fashion designer and perfumer Elsa Schiaparelli, country crooner Jimmie Rodgers, Lon Chaney and, what the hell, Coco Chanel — to tell a vampire story set in a hall of mirrors splattered with blood, perfume and sequins.
Written in a style of McCormack’s own invention, The Show That Smells reeks of genius and is the author’s most original work to date. Over three books McCormack has pared his language down to a carnie bark: his trim, vicious sentences make Gordan Lish look verbose and chubby in comparison. “Clavicles, scapulae, spine — Carrie caresses bone,” McCormack writes. “Soft bones. The dress has a skeleton. The dress has TB. Bones are embroideries. Raised ridges sewn onto the cloth. A technique called trapunto.” His obsessions may be high camp, but they are also underpinned with an acute evil. The Show That Smells’ villains tend to dress better than most, especially when delivering bold, unconscionable lines like, “At my vampire carnival, I’ll pinken popcorn with baby blood. Snow cones will come in a single flavor — baby blood.”
McCormack isn’t so beyond good and evil, however, as to forget about his innocent protagonists. Ringmaster that he is, McCormack knows just the right amount of suffering they should go through in order to make for a great performance.
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