Musings about Edward Gorey or Another reason to visit Cape Cod

The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin (2002). This book is a MUST for all Gorey fans. It contains numerous illustrations, showing the Gorey humor, and an insightful interview by artist Clifford Ross and an essay by art critic Karen Wilkin. For me, Gorey has that appealing quirky humor that many viewers remember from his introductions to the PBS mystery series. A series of odd scenes juxtaposed—people in black having cocktails on a lawn while a dead man slides into a pond. A lady sighs atop a building while police inspectors beam their flashlights on the ground. . . . Wilkin characterizes Gorey’s stories as “disorienting,” not macabre or grotesque but more like “Victorian nonsense.”

The book provides an overview of many of Gorey’s works--the odd collection of drawings where boundaries are blurred between animate and inanimate, humans and beasts. Take the Doubtful Guest, a penguin-esque creature with a red and white scarf and sneakers, who arrived 17 years earlier in one household. . . .where it continued to reside. Sound like any of your guests? Or the curious Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet of disasters that happened to children (“C is for Clara who wasted away” with drawings of a small child whose arm then head falls off). Not to mention those numerous drawings of contented felines. The interview reveals a non-assuming Gorey, someone with whom you would like to spend an afternoon. For people like me who are fascinated by this world, Gorey’s house in Yarmouth Port, Mass., is open to the public.