Dery briskly recounts the key points in Gorey’s coming-of-age. Drafted into the Army during World War II, Gorey served as a clerk in Utah before enrolling at Harvard, where the poet Frank O’Hara became a roommate and a close friend. Even though Gorey was “securely closeted at Harvard,” Dery writes, most of his college friends were gay and believed he was too. But aside from one source who says that Gorey made oblique mention of a sexual experience as a teenager, nobody could recall his having any romantic relationships that amounted to more than one of his unrequited “infatuations.”

Image Mark Dery Credit... C. Taylor Crothers

For the rest of his life, Dery says, Gorey would speak of sex with either “Swiftian disdain” or “Victorian mortification.” “I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something,” he told a reporter in 1980. “Every now and then someone will say my books are seething with repressed sexuality,” he said — and that, according to Gorey, was that.

As for those books, Dery is observant, appreciative and thorough in the extreme. The art criticism can drag, as Dery expends too many words of analysis. (Gorey loved to write nonsense, and Dery repeatedly dissects in minute detail the pointlessness of it all.) More illuminating are Dery’s descriptions of the dominant cultural context of the 1950s, when the young Gorey felt squeezed between a chipper consumerism on the one hand and the bullying masculinity of artists like Norman Mailer on the other. Gorey found inspiration in surrealism as he honed his “sinister-slash-cozy” aesthetic. He was fond of absurd juxtapositions, not just in his drawings but in his titles, too: “The Haunted Tea-Cosy,” “The Deadly Blotter,” “The Galoshes of Remorse.”

Minimalist deadpan can’t abide too much theorizing, and Dery’s portentous vow in his introduction to “use the tools of psychobiography” almost gave me the fantods (a favorite Gorey word). But Dery also knows that a stubborn enigma was essential to his subject’s charm, and by the end of his book, he relents: For all his desire to parse every symbol and clarify every joke, he has to let Gorey be. “Explaining something makes it go away,” Gorey once said, and like the revenants in his pictures, he planned to stay a while. “To catch and keep the public’s gaze / One must have lots of little ways.”