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The Gashlycrumb Tinies
--by Edward Gorey

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"A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh..." The rhyming couplets of this grim abecedarian are familiar, of course, to devotees of macabre humor, but the darkly crosshatched drawings are (as Poe put it) "the soul of the plot." Several years went by during which The Gashlycrumb Tinies: Or, After the Outing was not available in a small hardcover edition like this one, which is the true format for Edward Gorey\'s specialty, the adult picture book. --©Amazon.com

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The Haunted Tea-Cosy
--by Edward Gorey

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The Haunted Tea-Cosy is a classic work from that magnificently morbid master. The plot of this \'dispirited and distasteful diversion for Christmas\' revolves around one Edmund Gravel, an Edwardian Scrooge whose attempt to slice a stale fruitcake unleashes an assortment of guilt-inducing ghosts. There\'s the Spectre of Christmas That Never Was, who directs our hero\'s attention to a cowering orphan in a graveyard (along with some other, lower-key bits of pathos: \'In the high street of the village Reverend Flannel lost his tuning-fork.\') The Spectre of Christmas That Isn\'t also chips in with a kidnapping, a domestic dispute, and a return to the aforementioned graveyard: \'To the south, in the cemetery a wrong coffin in a newly dug grave was found to contain rolls of used wallpaper.\' Like the Dickensian miser upon whom he\'s based, Gravel is transformed by this ghoulish guided tour. He renounces his life of solitude and invites all of Lower Spigot to a party, featuring \'a cake taller than anything else in the room, a conflation of Chartres Cathedral and the Stupa at Borobudur iced in dazzling white sugar\' (not pictured, alas). Gorey\'s illustrations for The Haunted Tea-Cosy are looser and less elaborately cross-hatched than some of his earlier creations. But like the text, these oddly stilted and very Anglophiliac scenes remain a model of delicious, deadpan hilarity. --James Marcus, ©Amazon.com

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The Doubtful Guest
--by Edward Gorey

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Originally published in 1957, The Doubtful Guest serves as a prime example of the beauty, eccentricity, and brilliance of Edward Gorey\'s work. If the book was read aloud without revealing the accompanying black-and-white drawings, you might guess the tale came from the quirky genius of Dr. Seuss. The rhyming couplets and nonsensical verse (about an even more nonsensical creature) feel familiar, but in Gorey\'s skilled hands, the experience becomes altogether new.
The doubtful guest shows up unannounced and unwelcome, yet its presence is accepted after only a brief interlude of screaming. The staid, pale, Victorian inhabitants of the mansion alternately stare and glare at the doubtful guest as it tears out whole chapters from books, peels the soles of its white canvas shoes, and broods while lying on the floor ("inconveniently close to the drawing-room door"). Strangely, or rather, typically, as this is a Gorey book, the stymied occupants never ask the guest to leave -- and in 17 years it has still "shown no intention of going away." Maintaining a matter-of-fact tone in spite of true oddity is pure, delicious Gorey, and his trademark drawings are not to be missed. The ghostly, stark, and undeniably amusing illustrations make The Doubtful Guest an entrancing tale in which reserved, insular lives meet with the unexpected and bizarre. --©Amazon.com

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