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Nightmare Fuel / Edward Gorey

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Edward Gorey's works are seriously disturbing. Especially the way he drew things cavorting about and wrote stories that really have no sense or explanation at all. It's like they hired an Eldritch Abomination to write Victorian children's fiction.


  • The Insect God. Combine the very real fear of your young child being abducted with creepy insect cultists and you have a recipe for the willies like none other. Bonus points for the way the insects prance gleefully on the last page.
  • The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which is an alphabet book with creepy black & white etchings showing 26 ways for children to die, for example, "C is for Clara who wasted away".
    • Gorey, Gorey, what a hell of a way to die...
    • Not helping the horror is how in some cases, the exact cause of death is open to interpretation.
      • What exactly did the thug do to Hector?
      • What was Maud's experience out to sea like?
      • Who was the letter bomb that killed Titus directed towards?
  • The Curious Sofa. The fact that we don't see what it does makes it even more terrifying.
  • His intro to PBS's Mystery apparently scared a lot of younger viewers.
  • The Loathsome Couple is very loosely based upon the Moors Murders, a series of child-murders committed by serial killer couple Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. It's probably worth noting that all the murders take place off the page, Gorey goes out of his way to paint the killers as craven, cowardly, pathetic, and incompetent, and the book is one of the rare examples in Gorey's work where the perpetrators are punished for their crimes.
  • The West Wing is probably his most unsettling book by far. It just consists of various images of the eponymous wing, but the lack of text and images themselves having an unsettling aura of dread with no explanation behind them make for some high grade nightmare fuel. While some images have some supernatural entity or person in them, many of the images have nothing in them at all, save for an overturned chair or a toppled over bust, leaving readers to come up with their own conclusion as to what caused these things to happen.
  • ''The Doubtful Guest''. The guest itself, which hits something akin to Uncanny Valley because of how it looked almost, but not exactly like a penguin, is creepy enough. The fact that it somehow slips into a dark mansion with no mention of why or where it's from or what it is and won't leave is worse. And the guests just do their best to ignore it while it lives with them for seventeen years and counting, ripping up their books, hiding their towels, and running around.
  • While the fiction of John Bellairs probably deserves its own folder, Edward Gorey's illustrations to the original editions are Nightmare Fuel when viewed independently from the books they were created for.
  • The Wuggly Ump. Three children spend their day with innocent pastimes as the eponymous creature draws ever closer. Nothing unusual by Gorey standards, but then there's the implication that the children have accidentally summoned the Wuggly Ump just by reading about it.

    We pass our happy childhood hours
    In weaving endless chains of flowers.

    Across the hills the Wuggly Ump
    Is hurtling on, kerbash, kerblump!

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