- Paperback: 120 pages
- Publisher: a misFit book; 1 edition (Oct 1 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1550228552
- ISBN-13: 978-1550228557
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.2 x 1.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 181 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #44,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"The latest in Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery series, [Derek] McCormack's slender little send-up is funny and frenetic as all get out. Puns ('Skin smokes. Seared hair. Seared skin. Seared seersucker. Stinks. Chaney No. 5') and one-liners ('She makes herself into a mist. Vampires, like perfumes, vaporize') abound. The only thing the characters don't do is break out in song or yodel…It all makes sense in a lost-in-the-fun-house-on-laughing-gas kind of way [and] it's never boring. Like a carny barker, McCormack promises thrills and chills, and The Show That Smells delivers grotesqueries galore."—Los Angeles Times
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
The Show That Smells is the most SHOCKING story ever shown on the silver screen! It’s also the tale of Jimmie, a country music singer dying of tuberculosis, and Carrie, his wife, who tries to save him by selling her soul to a devil who designs HAUTE COUTURE CLOTHING! Elsa is a powerful Parisian dress designer, and a vampire. She wants to make Carrie look beautiful, smell beautiful – AND THEN SHE WANTS TO EAT HER! Will Carrie survive as her slave? Will Jimmie be cured? Starring a host of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Coco Chanel, Lon Chaney and the Carter Family, The Show That Smells is a thrilling tale of HILLBILLIES, HIGH FASHION, AND HORROR!
[Directed by Tod Browning (Freaks) from a screenplay by Derek McCormack. Black and white. 79 minutes.]
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Cure for Twilight, Sep 3 2009
By Christopher H. Wright "Splendid" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Show That Smells (Paperback)
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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A different kind of vampire story, Dec 21 2010
By TChris - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Show That Smells (Paperback)
The Show That Smells is a short novel (more novella length, if that) that casts its author, Derek McCormack, as a reporter for Vampire Vogue ("the bible of the fashionable fiend"). Vampire Vogue is published by Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian fashion designer who (Wikipedia tells me) was Coco Chanel's most prominent rival between the two world wars. Coco Chanel is also a character in the novel; Chanel No. 5, being blessed, is as effective against vampires as holy water. Singer Jimmie Rogers, actor Lon Chaney, and the vampire hunting, gospel singing Carter family round out the cast ... unless you count the carnival freaks (but they only show up as dressmakers).The novel is part of the Little House on the Bowery series so you know there's going to be blood ... but you knew that as soon as you heard about the vampires, didn't you? There's very little true gore, however, even during the descriptions of a vampire carnival (where babies are awarded as ring toss prizes).
This is a fun if slightly bizarre story. I am probably not a member of this novel's target audience. I know nothing about the world of women's fashion, and according to Schiaparelli, vampires are gay (this should come as a shock to the millions of women who elevate ridiculously bad vampire novels to the top of the best seller's lists). I don't know that I related to the novel as well as other readers might, but I thought it was quite funny (most of the time) and I appreciated the luxurious rhythm of the sentences (all of the time). Open minded readers of offbeat fiction should enjoy it.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vampires Come to the Carnie, Aug 8 2010
By Blake Fraina - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Show That Smells (Paperback)
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.
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