Line #150 Creator/EdwardGorey


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/edward_gorey.jpg]]
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3	Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer and illustrator best known for writing several short tales, often told in rhyme (usually couplets) and very surreal and macabre in tone. Gorey experimented with a wide variety of art styles over the years, but his trademark look was a very distinct and meticulous style of cross-hatched ink drawing that could be described as Victorian or Edwardian. He admitted that his own professional art training was "negligible", but he did illustration work for a wide variety of media, ranging from book covers and illustrations to the animated opening for the Creator/{{PBS}} show ''[[Series/{{Masterpiece}} Mystery!]]'', to creating the sets for the '70s smash hit Broadway production of ''Theatre/Dracula1924''.
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5	Gorey had a fondness for anagrams, jumbling up his own name to make several pseudonyms. He also liked [[AuthorAppeal ballet, silent movies, fur coats, vintage tennis shoes, and cats]], all of which were featured in his work. During his later years, he belatedly discovered television, and [[JustForFun/OneOfUs developed an affection for some of the darker shows of the era]], including ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'' and ''Series/TheXFiles''.
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7	Born in Chicago, he spent World War II manning a desk in Utah, attended Harvard (where he majored in French rather than art), and lived a large chunk of his life in New York City. He evidently was never terribly fond of that last city, seeming to consider it a sort of necessary evil that allowed him free access to his artistic commissions and far more importantly his cultural interests, most especially the New York City Ballet under the direction of the genius of George Balanchine; Gorey religiously attended every performance for years. With the death of Balanchine in 1982 and a steady income from the royalties for his more popular works, Gorey relocated to the small village of Yarmouth Port on Cape Cod, where he lived the rest of his life in semi-retirement (his house has since been turned into [[https://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org/ a museum]]), showing rather more interest in mounting various (rather bizarre) amateur theatrical productions than continuing his career as an author and illustrator. He died of a heart attack at the age of 75.
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9	[[foldercontrol]]
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11	[[folder:Notable Books published by Edward Gorey, in order of release:]]
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13	[[index]]
14	* ''The Unstrung Harp'' (1953): A look into the tortured creative mind, as a neurotic Edwardian-era author struggles through the process of writing, editing, and publishing his latest novel.
15	* ''The Listing Attic'' (1954): A large collection of limericks, some more dark than others, in a similar vein to Edward Lear.
16	* ''Literature/TheDoubtfulGuest'' (1957): A strange penguin...[[UglyCute thing]] takes up lodgings in a stately mansion and [[TheThingThatWouldNotLeave stays there for 17 years]].
17	* ''The Object-Lesson'' (1958): Gorey's debut into his signature storytelling style. A group of people attempt to search for an aristocrat's artificial limb in a string of events that aren't connected to each other.
18	* ''The Bug Book'' (1959): A family of bugs must work together to fight against a big black bug.
19	* ''The Fatal Lozenge'' (1960): Gorey's first alphabet book featuring 26 people and their occupations.
20	* ''Literature/TheCuriousSofa'' '': A Pornographic Novel by Ogdred Weary'' (1961): A grape-loving woman marries an aristocrat, and all kinds of sex-related mishaps ensue.
21	* ''Literature/TheHaplessChild'' (1961): The daughter of a British Army reservist is orphaned when her father is deemed dead in battle and her mother falls into a decline. Afterwards, the girl goes through many hellish episodes, each one worse than the last.
22	* ''The Willowdale Handcar: Or, the Return of the Black Doll'' (1962): A group of friends find a handcar and travel across the country.
23	* ''The Beastly Baby'' (1962): A book entailing the story of a hideously deformed baby which causes all kinds of mischief.
24	* ''The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction'' (1963)
25	** ''Literature/TheGashlycrumbTinies'': An alphabet book featuring the [[TheManyDeathsOfYou various grim deaths]] of [[CrossesTheLineTwice 26 small children]].
26	** ''The Insect God'': A small child is abducted by anthropomorphic insects to be sacrificed to their god.
27	** ''The West Wing'': A completely wordless book that showcases the rooms of a supernatural building.
28	* ''The Wuggly Ump'' (1963): One of Gorey's more child-friendly books, it details the experience of a group of three children and a creature called "The Wuggly Ump".
29	* ''Literature/TheEpiplecticBicycle'' (1969): Two children ride a strange and seemingly magical bicycle on a journey of gothic nonsense.
30	* ''The Loathsome Couple'' (1977): When a couple is unable to bear children, they go about abducting random children and murdering them in cold blood.
31	[[/index]]
32	* ''The Dwindling Party'' (1982): A pop-up book where the [=MacFizzet=] family is [[DwindlingParty offed one by one]] during a visit to an abandoned mansion.
33	* ''The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas.'' (1997): Depressed, miserly loner Edmund Gravel is taken through a bizarre variation on YetAnotherChristmasCarol that is equal parts creepy, cynical, and comical.
34	* ''The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium'' (1999): Gorey's last published work before his death. It is a sequel to ''The Haunted Tea-Cosy'', involving a giant MindScrew look at the human condition that will likely end with your brain dribbling out your ears as you try to make sense of what you've just read.
35	[[/index]]
36	[[/folder]]
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38	----
39	!!Tropes exhibited in the works of Edward Gorey:
40	* AffectionateParody: ''The Awdrey-Gore Legacy'' is one for the works of Creator/AgathaChristie, his all-time favorite author.
41	* AlphabeticalThemeNaming: Each of the twenty-six children in ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'' are named after a letter in the English Alphabet. Along with that, the deaths are sorted by each of the children's initials in said book.
42	* AmbiguousGender: Zigzagged in ''The Green Beads''. The book features a "disturbed person" of an indiscernible gender towards the beginning. In the latter half, they're revealed to be female.
43	* AmbiguouslyBrown: The entry for "X" in ''The Fatal Lozenge'', features a waitress in a cafe with this look who seems blissfully unaware of the fact that a racist customer (the eponymous Xenophobe) is silently fighting the urge to beat her up. Played more straight in ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'', where the thugee cult member that strangles Hector appears to have a darker skin tone.
44	* AnimalisticAbomination: There's something... not quite right about the title character of ''{{Literature/The Doubtful Guest}}''.
45	* AnimateInanimateObject: ''The Inanimate Tragedy'' puts an interesting twist on this idea by having objects commit suicide.
46	* {{Anthology}}: Many of his works are available in the "Amphigorey" anthology collections.
47	* AuthorAppeal: To say that Gorey was a ballet enthusiast during his years living in New York City is something of an understatement, and its influence filtered throughout his work. In particular, ''The Lavender Leotard'' and ''The Gilded Bat'' pay homage to the art.
48	* BabiesMakeEverythingBetter: Inverted with the aptly-named "Beastly Baby". Gorey goes out of his way to make the thing as unpleasant as possible: aside from being physically repulsive, it's smelly, whiny, and cruel (one of the illustrations shows it ''killing a kitten'', which [[KindheartedCatLover Gorey would have considered]] a MoralEventHorizon), and no one is particularly concerned when it is snatched up by an eagle one day and falls to earth with a very audible splat (or rather, a "wet sort of explosion") when the eagle loses its grip.
49	* BarbieDollAnatomy: Despite being a "pornographic" novel, all of the characters in ''The Curious Sofa'' apparently have no genitals. Played straight in ''The Grand Passion'', where one of the characters is depicted nude.
50	* BearsAreBadNews: The titular ''Evil Garden'' in the book of the same name had ferocious bears that guard its fruit. Also, Basil from ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'' was "assaulted by bears".
51	* BestialityIsDepraved: ''Very'' thinly veiled in ''The Curious Sofa'':
52	-->''They were soon joined by Donald, Herbert's singularly well-favored sheepdog, and many were the giggles and barks that came from the shrubbery.''
53	* BigCreepyCrawlies:
54	** The primary inhabitants of ''The Evil Garden''.
55	** The followers of the eponymous ''Insect God''.
56	** The Bahum Bug, deuteragonist of ''The Haunted Tea Cosy'' and ''The Headless Bust''.
57	* BilingualBonus: Frequently (but almost always subverted, as Gorey admitted he was bad with foreign languages). ''The Blue Aspic'' (a story about opera) and ''The Gilded Bat'' (about ballet) are filled with names and titles that turn out to be ''hilarious'' to anyone who knows the languages or can look them up.
58	** E.g.: The protagonists of ''The Blue Aspic'', Jasper Ankle and Ortenzia Caviglia, are linked by their names -- ''caviglia'' is "ankle" in Italian. Caviglia's agents are named Rigaglie ("Giblets" in Italian) and Vithologos ("Drummer" in Greek).
59	* BlackBeadEyes: Traditionally, almost every character in Gorey's illustrations has these. On some occasions, characters will have {{Skintone Sclerae}} instead. Some of his books avert both of these entirely.
60	* BlackComedy: Much like Creator/CharlesAddams, Gorey was an expert at finding humor in even the grisliest situations.
61	* BodyInABreadbox: Used in a limerick:
62	-->From Number Nine, Penwiper Mews,\
63	There comes most abominable news.\
64	They've discovered a head\
65	In the box for the bread,\
66	But nobody seems to know whose.
67	* BookBurning: Henry Clump from ''The Pious Infant'' does this to every book which has lines that could potentially be interpreted to rebel against God. Though this is downplayed, as he does not so much burn the books, as much as cross off and blot out the allegedly heretical lines from said books.
68	* CelebrityIsOverrated: He was never particularly thrilled about becoming (moderately) famous.
69	* CelibateEccentricGenius: Gorey professed to be UsefulNotes/{{asexual}} and to find the whole question of sex "tiresome", and devoted his life to his work and his hobbies (like attending every performance of the New York City Ballet for about two decades straight) -- not that this stopped him from producing works that treated sex in a satirical manner, most notably ''The Curious Sofa''.
70	* ClothingDamage: The entire premise of ''The Abandoned Sock'', although it is not played for fanservice. In a similar vein as ''The Hapless Child'', a sentient sock comes off a clothesline when it decides it's bored of being there, and then goes through all kinds of damage and deterioration when it is found by a small child in the sea.
71	* CluelessMystery: Parodied in ''The Iron Tonic''. All throughout the book are pictures of landscapes. On each page there is a close-up of what seems to be a clue to the supposed mystery. In actuality, none of the clues connect together in any meaningful way.
72	* CollectorOfTheStrange: His home at the time of his death was crammed with bric-a-brac he had accumulated over the years.
73	* CreatorCameo: He drew himself into his comics from time to time, most notably "He wrote it all down Zealously."
74	** In fact, he ''kills himself off'' in ''The Chinese Obelisks'', or a person who looks alarmingly similar to him (long beard, fur coat, white shoes).
75	* CreatureOfHabit: Gorey freely admitted he was one of these, developing daily routines that he religiously stuck to. (Though said routines did shift over the years, especially after he relocated from New York.)
76	* DadaComics: Arguably some of his stranger works veer into this territory. For instance, ''The Inanimate Tragedy'' is about a bunch of small objects committing suicide. ''L'Heure Bleue'' (The Blue Hour) is about two dogs in sweaters having [[SeinfeldianConversation bizarre conversations]].
77	* DraggedOffToHell: The fate of the protagonist of ''The Disrespectful Summons''.
78	* DropTheCow: A common gag in Gorey's works is that objects will mysteriously fall from the sky out of nowhere, sometimes even killing people.
79	* EerilyOutOfPlaceObject: From time to time, a creepy faceless, armless black stuffed doll appears in his books, often well hidden. Whenever it shows up, it usually indicates that something terrible is about to happen.
80	* EldritchAbomination: The titular ''Insect God'' seems to be one.
81	* EnfantTerrible: The titular ''Beastly Baby'', who burns the upholstery with acid and shoots bric-a-brac off of tables. The book as a whole can be thought of as an exaggerated representation of the hardships of having a baby.
82	* ExcessiveMourning: Defied in ''The Osbick Bird''. The titular bird becomes good friends with a man named Emblus Fingby for many years. After he dies, the bird mourns his death for several months, sitting on his tombstone. It then decides to move on and flies off. The wording gives the event a bit of a cynical edge.
83	-->He was interred, the bird alone\
84	Was left to sit upon his stone.\
85	But after several months, one day\
86	It changed its mind and flew away.
87	* ExtremeOmnivore: The title character of Literature/TheDoubtfulGuest eats all of the toast and syrup in an Edwardian family's house, along with part of a dinner plate.
88	** Aside from eating children, the Wuggly Ump is said to eat umbrellas, gunny sacks, brass doorknobs, mud, and carpet tacks.
89	* FeatheredFiend: The title character of Literature/TheDoubtfulGuest is an AnimalisticAbomination that looks vaguely like a penguin. Downplayed in that it's more of a nuisance than a threat, but that doesn't stop it from being creepy.
90	* FriendToAllLivingThings: Gorey was a well-known animal welfare advocate, especially in his later years. So much so that he decided to open up a portion of his home to a family of raccoons that settled in his attic. This was also what got him to abandon his trademark fur coat. After he died, all of the money he had gathered was sent off to several animal charities.
91	* {{Gamebooks}}: ''The Raging Tide or The Black Doll's Imbroglio'': Not a game, exactly, but this non-linear story uses the Choose Your Own Adventure technique.
92	* GardenOfEvil: ''The Evil Garden'', [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin obviously]].
93	* TheGhost: ''The Sinking Spell'' repeatedly mentions the presence of a flying creature that is steadily descending until it eventually phases through the ground. Said creature is neither named nor is it ever shown in the book.
94	* GreenRocks: Many of Gorey's works reference an elusive substance known as "Q.R.V.". It has many amazing (yet harrowing) properties, but no one knows for sure what it actually is.
95	* HarmlessVillain: The title character of ''Literature/TheDoubtfulGuest'' is more creepy and annoying than truly malicious.
96	* HatesTheJobLovesTheLimelight: Inverted, in that Gorey evidently enjoyed sitting in a tiny room drawing machine-like cross-hatching all day, and was at best ambivalent about his growing fame.
97	* HereWeGoAgain: The last panel of ''The Eleventh Episode'' dovetails into its first.
98	* HumanSacrifice: [[spoiler:The worshippers of ''The Insect God'' do this to the child they kidnapped]].
99	* IdiosyncraticEpisodeNaming: Almost every title of his books follows a "The [adjective] [noun]" scheme
100	* ImprobableInfantSurvival: Unsurprisingly, usually averted. To wit:
101	** ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'', in one famous example, comes up with a hilarious child death for every letter of the alphabet.
102	** ''The Beastly Baby''. When it finally meets its end, no one is sad to see it go.
103	** ''The Hapless Child'' is another aversion of this, as is ''The Insect God''.
104	** Zigzagged in ''The Dwindling Party''. Neville, youngest of the Macfizzets, is the only survivor among the seven, but the casualties also include the not-much-older-looking Emily.
105	** One rare straight instance of this is in ''The Sopping Thursday'', where the dog in the story saves an infant from falling into an open sewer.
106	* {{Irony}}: When told his cordless phone's battery cost $22, Gorey threw his head back and moaned. The speaker thought he was reacting to the price of the battery, but no, he'd suffered a heart attack. His death was straight out of one of his books.
107	* {{Jerkass}}: Some of his books have one in some shape or form.
108	** The titular character in ''The Doubtful Guest''
109	** Just about everyone aside from the protagonist and her family in ''The Hapless Child''
110	** A few noteworthy characters in ''The Curious Sofa''
111	** Henry Clump from ''The Pious Infant''
112	** Embley and Yewbert from ''The Epiplectic Bicycle''
113	** The titular ''Loathsome Couple''
114	* KidsAreCruel: Just ask Charlotte Sophia, the titular ''Hapless Child''.
115	* KindheartedCatLover: To say Gorey loved cats would be an understatement. He'd draw many cats in some of his books as well. He was often considered by his friends as sweet and genial.
116	* LaterInstallmentWeirdness: Compared to his older books, the art style of Gorey's more recent books (Most notably everything after ''The Unknown Vegetable'') is considerably more simplistic. Characters also appear to be more bug-eyed and spindly in appearance.
117	* LivingShadow: The three spectres in ''The Haunted Tea-Cosy'' are all represented as literal shadows.
118	* LoonyFan: ''The Blue Aspic'' has Jasper Ankle, who is utterly obsessed with the fictional opera singer Ortenzia Caviglia. Throughout the book, he is shown to obsessively wait to buy tickets to her shows, collect various newspaper clippings that mention her, write long letters to her that go unanswered, walk onto the set as she was performing, get sent to an asylum for his obsession, and finally fatally stabbing her in the throat before he stabs himself.
119	* MadLibThrillerTitle: ''The Iron Tonic'', ''The Sinking Spell'', ''The Remembered Visit'' etc.
120	* MeaningfulName: With a name like Edward [[IncrediblyLamePun GOREy]], is no surprise that he wrote ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies''. Though he evidently rolled his eyes at critics and reviewers who took the easy route in referencing his name in this fashion.
121	** In-Universe, a lot of characters in Gorey's works also have these. For example, the surname of character Ortenzia Caviglia is actually the Italian word for "ankle", much like that of her stalker, Jasper Ankle.
122	* MindScrew: Every one of his books, really, but most notably ''The Epiplectic Bicycle''. Those kids were apparently on their strange bike ride for ''173 years'', with "only an obelisk raised to their memory" where their house should be.
123	* MonochromeCasting: As befitting the faux-Edwardian style of the illustrations, the number of non-white people who appear in his work can be counted on one hand.
124	* MultiGenderedOutfit: One of the limericks in ''The Listing Attic'' concerns the "[[AmbiguouslyGay Cousins]]" from Herts, whose "[[AmbiguousGender sex is in doubt]] / For they're never without / Their moustaches and long, trailing skirts". In Gorey's illustration they also have bowler hats, and the one with the upturned moustache has a tie while the one with the drooping moustache has a collar brooch.
125	* NervousWreck: Mr. Earbrass, the successful but tortured novelist at the center of ''The Unstrung Harp''.
126	* NoEnding: A good chunk of Gorey's books do not have proper endings, but instead stop very abruptly.
127	* NonHumanHead: ''The Prune People'', as indicated by the title, is all about a race of people that have prunes for heads.
128	* NoodleImplements: In ''The Willowdale Handcar'', what is going on with Nellie, Dick, and the man in the canoe?
129	* NoodleIncident: It's much easier to count all of the books that ''don't'' implement any of these.
130	* OurMonstersAreWeird: Many of Gorey's works are chock full of surreal creatures, especially in ''The Utter Zoo''. Examples include the Ulp, which is so small it can "hardly be seen at all", the Ombledroom which is considerably large and white, and the Scrug which is "unusable for cooking".
131	* PerfectlyCromulentWord: Much like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Gorey was also exceptionally fond of creating new words. His most famous example is found in the title of ''The Epiplectic Bicycle''.
132	* PictureBooks: ''The West Wing'' (not [[Series/TheWestWing that one]]) has no words, just increasingly unnerving illustrations.
133	* PleasureIsland: The titular ''Evil Garden'' seems fine, you can even get in there for no fee. But then people start dying when they enter.
134	* PrintLongRunners: Even after more than 50 years, with a small cult following no less, ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'' has never gone out of print.
135	* QuicksandSucks: In ''The Evil Garden'' one of the characters dies by being sucked into a bubbling pond. Quentin, in ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'', meets his end the same way.
136	* RandomEventsPlot: ''The Object Lesson'' is an early example, with barely any connection between one sentence and the next.
137	* ReclusiveArtist: He didn't exactly hide from the world, but he was an intensely private man who kept his various friendships rigidly compartmentalized and almost never shared his true feelings.
138	* RecycledPremise: Both ''The Hapless Child'' and ''The Abandoned Sock'' both have very similar premises.
139	* [[RecurringExtra Reoccurring Prop]]: A small white visiting card, usually lying on the ground, appears in almost every book.
140	** To a lesser degree, the author's enormous fur coat often turns up.
141	* {{Retraux}}: Has the look of Victorian or Edwardian illustration.
142	* ShoehornedFirstLetter: Many of his alphabetical poems would often use, for X, words that actually begin with an E, such as "excited."
143	** Averted in ''The Gashlycrumb Tinies'' with "X is for Xerxes [[CruelAndUnusualDeath devoured by mice]]."
144	** Lampshaded in ''The Eclectic Abecedarium'' with "The letter X / is made to vex."
145	* SignificantAnagram: "Ogdred Weary," "Dogear Wryde", "Regera Dowdy", "D. Awdrey-Gore", "Waredo Dyrge", "E.G. Deadworry"...
146	** Combined with BilingualBonus at least once. ''The Evil Garden'' is credited to Eduard Blutig ("Edward ''Gory''" in German), with translation by Mrs. Regera Dowdy and illustrations by O. Müde ("Ogdred ''Weary''" in German).
147	* SpeechBubbles: Gorey usually uses these whenever he wanted to make a character in his stories talk.
148	* TheThingThatWouldNotLeave: The titular ''[[Literature/TheDoubtfulGuest Doubtful Guest]]''.
149	* TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth: Parodied in ''The Pious Infant''.
150	* VagueAge: ''The Lavender Leotard'' stars two children who are "ageless" performing many ballet acts with accompanying texts.
151	* VoidBetweenTheWorlds: Gorey likes to play with this trope a lot in his books, especially when it came to the concept of death. He would often describe death as "the border of borders".
152	* WalkingTheEarth: ''The Willowdale Handcar''. Three cousins, bored of their small-town life, find an old pumpcart at the railway station and decide to take it for a whirl. Their travels take them further out of the town, and they write back to their families, not sure of when they'll come back, and spend their time visiting odd curiosities before [[GainaxEnding entering a train tunnel and never appearing from the other side.]]
153	* WhenTreesAttack: ''Tragédies Topiares'', a collection of postcards, revolves around specifically shaped topiaries attacking people in unusual ways.
154	* WordSaladTitle: Several of Gorey's works bear titles with seemingly no relation to the work itself; ''The Blue Aspic'', for example, is about a devious opera singer and her disturbed admirer, while ''The Fatal Lozenge'' is an alphabetical series of poems about people of various occupations and the dreadful things that they do.
155	* WouldHurtAChild: A reoccurring crime that occurs in Gorey's works.

Context Creator / EdwardGorey