An illustrator's macabre whimsy enjoys an afterlife
News bulletin from the spirit world: The specter of Edward Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, is haunting our collective unconscious.
In a sense that's as it should be; Gorey was born to be posthumous. His poisonously funny little picture books established him as the master of high-camp macabre.
Told in verse and illustrated in a style that crosses Surrealism with the Victorian true-crime gazette, Gorey stories are set in some unmistakably British place, in a time that is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian and Jazz Age all at once.
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