<p><i>The Well-Dressed Wound</i> is Derek McCormack's play script &quot;séance&quot;: a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum's American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka &quot;King Faggot&quot;). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS.</p><p>While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp,<i>The Well-Dressed Wound</i> is McCormack's most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in <i>Artforum</i>, puts &quot;the 'pus' back in opus.&quot; Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. &quot;Being dead is so very now,&quot; Hainley opines. &quot;This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive.&quot;</p>