A death-haunted world

‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet in dactylic couplets of the surreal fates visited on a succession of blameless tots, is probably Edward Gorey’s best-known work — and that work forms a pretty coherent whole. Dozens and dozens of tiny booklets, almost all intricately hand-crosshatched in black pen, darkly spoofing established genres, set in a Victorian-Edwardian world of sighing flappers, funerary urns and decaying stately homes. They are filled with surreal menace and random violence or moral horror — much of it offstage — and always played for laughs. The dreamlike, associative drift of Gorey’s work — is that an umbrella or a bat? — is linked by his biographer to the old surrealist game ‘Exquisite Corpse’. Well, quite.

Gorey has here and there been described as ‘Dr Seuss for Tim Burton fans’ and ‘the Charles Schulz of the macabre’, but he was in every way more wayward and interesting than that.