Gorey Details

If you were an inhabitant of Edward Gorey's universe— beautifully depicted in a new monograph out this month from Abrams—you might be sucked dry by leeches, fed a fatal lozenge, sacrificed to an insect god, or besieged by an amorphous sock-baby houseguest who just won't go.

The World of Edward Gorey, by Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin, is a delightful collection of Gorey-ana: a thoughtful interview with the 71-year-old writer and artist, an essay on his nearly 100 books, and an assemblage of his best pen-andink artwork from the past five decades. It's a fabulous world of Edwardian drawing rooms and ominous landscapes populated by wanton kohl-eyed women, eccentric ballerinas, mustachioed gents in raccoon overcoats, capering felines, and phlegmatic tots dogged by melancholy. Some Gorey tales satirize 19th-century melodrama, others appear to be Dadaist poems, dark masterpieces of surreal morality. Master of the macabre, Gorey is a wicked pleasure. In The Curious Sofa, a parody of pornographic novels, he offers this delicacy: "Still later Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan." What bliss.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL