For an artist who specialized in the uncanny, Edward Gorey has become a little too familiar. Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of writers and artists distinctive enough to have an adjective named after them. The word “Goreyesque” immediately conjures a handful of images and tropes: crepuscular mansions, statuary urns, unquiet spirits, desolate moors, and small children meeting untimely ends. He drew this iconography from fin de siècle gothic horror, but the gothic, in Gorey’s work, is never played straight. It’s always mixed, in his biographer Mark Dery’s words, with “a shot of black comedy, a jigger of irony, and a dash of high camp.”



Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery Little, Brown and Company, 512 pp., $16.99

Gorey is widely acknowledged as the master, if not the in- ventor, of this mode. Even people who haven’t read The Doubtful Guest or The Gashlycrumb Tinies will likely recognize Gorey’s elegant, fastidiously crosshatched pen-and-ink drawings of waifish orphans and bald-headed, bearded men in long fur coats and tennis shoes. As Dery points out in Born to Be Posthumous—the first full-length biography of Gorey to appear since his death in 2000—he has exerted a durable influence on popular culture, as Young Adult novelists like Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Ransom Riggs have brought his arch aesthetic to a large and fervent audience. His own works, meanwhile—once available only in limited-edition volumes—now adorn coffee mugs, calendars, refrigerator magnets, iPhone cases, and even salad tongs.

One drawback of this popularization is that Gorey is too easily pegged as the peddler of a kind of twee-goth miniaturism: “Dr. Seuss for Tim Burton fans,” as Dery puts it. Even during his lifetime, he resisted being described as “macabre.” “It sort of annoys me to be stuck with that,” Gorey told a journalist in the late 1970s. “What I’m really doing is something else entirely.” The gothic, for Gorey, was one costume among many, and while it’s clearly one in which he felt especially comfortable, his work radiates a melancholy and an existential unease—as well as a formal inventiveness—that none of his imitators have matched, and that small samplings of his work don’t reveal.

It’s very hard, in fact, to put one’s finger on the Goreyesque—at least as Gorey himself practiced it. His aesthetic, Dery writes, is “an aesthetic of the inscrutable, the ambiguous, the evasive, the oblique, the insinuated, the understated, the unspoken.” It’s easy to forget how little happens in much of Gorey’s work, how essentially atmospheric it is, in both its horror and its humor. A creature of habit (with a habit of inventing creatures), Gorey was at least as attracted to the quotidian as he was to the bizarre. “Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time,” he told the writer Alexander Theroux late in his life. “At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.”

Although he played up his eccentricities in public, Gorey was fundamentally a shy, private man who seemed to take a perverse pride in the dullness of his own existence. “My life is as near not being one as is possible I think,” he wrote to a friend in 1951, and things didn’t pick up much from there. He had relatively few friends, and virtually no close ones. He lived alone (or, rather, with cats) for decades, first in Manhattan and later in a Federal-style house on Cape Cod. He had no sexual or romantic relationships that we know of, and his rise to relative fame in the 1970s and ’80s changed his lifestyle very little.