The cover illustration depicts Death as a skeletal nanny, surrounded by his charges. “They’re the easiest targets.”Īctually, there is one parental figure in the book. Emblems of innocence and naïveté, children make perfect victims, as Gorey told the New Yorker. But as with Beckett’s absurdist tragicomedies, Gorey’s darkly droll tales touch-lightly-on weighty matters: the death of God, the meaning of life, and, always and everywhere, our impending mortality. Gorey’s books look at first glance like children’s books, or at least children’s books from the Victorian or Edwardian ages in which they’re often set, and his tongue-in-cheek takeoffs on children’s genres like the Puritan primer or the 19 th-century morality tale make them sound like them, too. Gorey, who died in 2000 at 75, was the author and illustrator of a hundred or so little picture books whose pen-and-ink illustrations flawlessly counterfeit Victorian engravings and whose lugubriously amusing nonsense verse, equal parts Edward Lear and Samuel Beckett, spins black comedy from murder, mayhem, and existential malaise. This essay is adapted from Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, out now from Little, Brown.Ĭhild abuse was Edward Gorey’s métier, in a manner of speaking. Roman Polanski, David Bowie, and a New Solution to the Problem of Art Made by Monstrous Men Guess What? This Mystery Story Written by Robots Is Kind of Good! The Four-Month Scandal That Made Martin Amis the Center of the Literary World He’s One of Twitter’s Most Beloved Writers.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey