Gory stories for tiny tots
“Many of Edward Gorey’s most fervent devotees think he must be both a) English and b) dead,” reads the biographical note on one of his darkly illustrated tales of hapless babies, consumptive waifs and sexually traumatising furniture. “Actually, he has never so much as visited either place.”
No longer, sadly: though Gorey never did make it across the Atlantic, he is now – owing to a heart attack in April, aged 75, in the cat-filled Cape Cod farmhouse where he lived alone – a permanent resident of the other side. It’s easy to see why readers thought he moved there years ago, his more than 50 books seeming to have issued from the pen of the love child (orphaned, of course) of Ivy Compton Burnett and Edgar Allan Poe.
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