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Makes Economic Sense, If Nothing Else...
Amphigorey
Edward Gorey
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If for no other reason
than cost-efficiency, you ought to buy this collection of the late
Edward Gorey's books; it doesn't cost very much more than any of
the individual hard-cover original editions of the fifteen books
collected here.
Most people will recognise Gorey as the designer of the credits for the
long-running PBS series "Mystery!", if nothing else; but he is so much
more.
If i were forced to guess, based strictly on the contents of the
fifteen volumes collected here, i would have had to say that Edward
Gorey was obviously an elderly and somewhat dotty Englishman. As a
matter of fact, he was neither elderly nor English -- but that's the
type of material he excelled at; that somewhat macabre but utterly
devastating straight-faced black humour that seems to a Mere Colonial
such as myself as Utterly British.
One could, for instance, question whether the untimely demise of
twenty-six children -- in alphabetical order, with lovingly-rendered
illustrations of their antepenultimate moments -- was a fit subject for
humour. Whether or not it is becomes a moot question almost as soon as
one begins reading The Gashleycrumb Tinies:
"A"
is
for
ANNA,
who
fell
down
the
stairs.
"B" is for BASIL, assaulted by Bears...
Sick or not, if you can read all twenty-six pages of this little
monograph and not laugh, there is something wrong with you.
Possibly the best thing in the book -- though it's all
excellent -- is The Unstrung Harp, or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel,
which
has
been
described
by
an
acquaintance
who works as an editor at a
major New York publisher as one of the more accurate portrayals of the
process he has ever read. {Horrifyingly so, i inferred from his
comments.}
Rather gentler and more restrained and cultured than the work of Gahan
Wilson, a bit less anarchic than "The Far Side", this is still a
wonderful antidote to all of society's little hypocrisies and refusals
to face the reality of the gleeful darkness that every one of us has
(generally fairly well) hidden somewhere in our soul. |
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