McCORMACK, Derek

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Gutter Press, 56 The Esplanade, Suite 503, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5E 1A7.

CAREER: Writer. Book City, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, bookseller.

WRITINGS:

Dark Rides: A Novel in Stories (also see below), Gutter Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1996.

Halloween Suite, Pas de Chance (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

(With Chris Chambers) Wild Mouse, Pedlar Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

Wish Book: A Catalogue of Stories (also see below), illustrated by Ian Phillips, Gutter Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1999.

Western Suit, Pas de Chance (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

(Selector, with André Alexis and Diane Schoemperlen) The Journey Prize Anthology: Short Fiction from the Best of Canada's New Writers, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

The Haunted Hillbilly, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

Grab Bag (contains Dark Rides and Wish Book; "Little House on the Bowery" series), Akashic Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including the Quarterly and Malahat Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Derek McCormack is an openly gay Canadian writer who has written a number of books. His 1996 work, Dark Rides: A Novel in Stories, is set in 1952 and collects short stories that follow the life of gay teen Derek McCormack in a small Canadian town. The gothic stories are set in a time well before the author's actual teen years, taking place at carnivals, ranches, and other rural settings where the young Derek has his first sexual encounters. Quill & Quire contributor Bill Richardson felt that the chapters "manage to cover that treacly waterfront, 'coming of age,' without getting all sticky and sweet, or worse, bittersweet. There is some powerful writing here." Thom J. Doorhy reviewed Dark Rides in Lambda Book Report, commenting that "this is the novel that will make a reader glad to have read what boils down to a 'coming out story.' But one of the best of them. It is not his story that makes Dark Rides special, it is McCormack's intimacy with it and talent in detailing it."

The four stories of Halloween Suite—"The Party-Pooper," "The Curator," "The Emcee," and "The Magician"—are enhanced with interior illustrations taken from old Halloween decorations, and the book features a pocket containing a "Peterborough Public Library" card listing sign-out dates of October 31 for every year from 1935 to 1957.

McCormack's Wild Mouse contains the stories "The Newshawk," "The Freak," and "The Carny" by McCormack, as well as poems by Chris Chambers. This artistically designed volume features embossing, stamping, coated and textured papers, and sepia toned archival photographs from the Canadian National Exhibition. Marnie Parsons noted in the University of Toronto Quarterly that McCormack and Chambers's writings work well together: "Both write with spareness and economy; neither indulges in emotional or 'literary' excess, and neither is without irony." She added, "McCormack's prose practices the thrift that 'seems essential to poetry' as Anne Carson suggests in a recent essay published in Brick; he makes much with very little, and his writing is more resonant, more humorously understated because of that."

Darren Werschler-Henry reviewed Halloween Suite, Wild Mouse, and Wish Book: A Catalogue of Stories in Books in Canada. According to this critic, "the best term for McCormack's writing style might be anti-nostalgia. In Wish Book, McCormack presents us with the simulacrum of a pre-WWII Canadian boyhood, patched together from ads on the backs of comic books, yellowing scrapbook photographs, newspaper clippings, and book-learned carny lore. This rich source material is saturated with the adolescent desire for the forbidden and the unknown."

Richardson also reviewed Wish Book, which, like Dark Rides, "is set in some vaguely defined, relatively recent, netherworld." As in Dark Rides, McCormack peoples his stories with characters who live on the edges of society—sideshow freaks, carnies, and poor farmers. "In deftly crafted, aphoristic sentences, he X-rays everyday things and reveals the threat, the potential violence that is scarcely contained beneath their scored, pocked surfaces," wrote Richardson. "God is in the details, and the details here are especially odd and fascinating."

The Haunted Hillbilly is the fictional story of the relationship between country singer Hank Williams and "Nudie" Cohn, the Hollywood clothier who was responsible for dressing such celebrities as Elvis and Cher. Nudie here is a gay vampire who causes Williams's demise. Adam Lewis Schroeder, writing in This magazine, felt that "Hillbilly takes noir into the truly black." Zachary Houle commented on both The Haunted Hillbilly and Grab Bag for PopMatters.com, noting that McCormack "is an incredible stylist who uses minimalist prose and non-sequiturs to great effect." Houle further wrote that McCormack's novella-length writings are "mostly about coming to grips about one's sexuality. . . . His word play is carefully considered, yet his characterizations feel hollow. It's as though he has something to say, but can't really express himself beyond the limited framework of a short story."

Werschler-Henry, George Murray, and Peter Darbyshire discussed The Haunted Hillbilly for Bookninja. com. Darbyshire felt that "the scale of McCormack's books is related to their concern with disconnection. His style is stripped back and minimal to the point of disruption, and I think the resulting narrative disconnection—or instability, or incoherence, or whatever you want to call it—reflects the social ruptures that are the real subjects of McCormack's tales of depravity and lust (not necessarily in that order). He kind of fractures the traditional mechanics of storytelling and reassembles them in a new order, which is loaded with significance when you're dealing with a historical subject, as he is with The Haunted Hillbilly."

While Werschler-Henry described the book as having a "creepy vitality," he also added: "one of the things that interests me most in The Haunted Hillbilly is the content—the reassessment of pop culture figures that we think we know, or pop institutions that we think we know." Noting McCormack's enjoyment of the television program Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the critic added that The Haunted Hillbilly "is about killing nostalgia by tearing off the gauzy filters that time has placed over people and events. It's not really queer revisionism as much as it is an unflinching look at the things we choose to ignore about our cultural icons."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, October, 1996, Eve Tihanyi, review of Dark Rides: A Novel in Stories, pp. 39-41; February, 2000, Darren Werschler-Henry, reviews of Wish Book: A Catalogue of Stories, Halloween Suite, and Wild Mouse, p. 25.

Essays on Canadian Writing, spring, 2001, Peter Dickinson, "Derek McCormack: In Context and Out," p. 51.

Lambda Book Report, September, 1966, Thom J. Doorhy, review of Dark Rides, p. 19.

Quill & Quire, February, 1996, Bill Richardson, review of Dark Rides, p. 32; July, 1999, Bill Richardson, review of Wish Book, p. 40.

This, January-February, 2004, Adam Lewis Schroeder, review of The Haunted Hillbilly, p. 47.

University of Toronto Quarterly, winter, 1999, Marnie Parsons, review of Wild Mouse, p. 42.

ONLINE

Bookninja.com,http://www.bookninja.com/ (August, 2003), George Murray, Darren Werschler-Henry, and Peter Darbyshire, review of The Haunted Hillbilly.

PopMatters.com,http://www.popmatters.com/ (July 20, 2004), Zachary Houle, reviews of The Haunted Hillbilly and Grab Bag.*