Dark Delights
But you’d swear, looking at his comic-but-disturbing illustrated books, that the man was born into a dreary British family in a shabby village called Puddlington or something.
Happily, the instantly identifiable Gorey universe — built on “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” “The Unstrung Harp,” his Tony Award-winning costume design for “Dracula,” his animated intro for the long-running PBS show “Mystery!” — has become part of America’s background cultural fabric.
Gorey created a pen-and-ink, genteel, British-looking landscape in which bad things happened to small children, people had oddly shaped heads, the sun rarely shone and a vague air of menace hung about the tea room.
He began illustrating books for Doubleday in the early 1950s and created the covers for hundreds of books, illustrated posters and magazine articles by the score and wrote and illustrated over 100 of his own works.
Never married, Gorey bought an 18th-century sea captain’s house on Cape Cod, where he lived with several cats. He described his books as “Victorian novels all scrunched up.”
“Gashlycrumb” is styled as a child’s alphabet book, but each letter stands for a child who is about to die in a most unfortunate way: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.” Above this line we see little Amy, ghostly white with black eyes, hurtling face-first down a dark set of stairs, arms outstretched.
We can only imagine what Gorey would have drawn for his own “Happy 100th Birthday!” card, but it would likely have involved something most regrettably unfortunate for birthday party guests.