The ups and downs of Gorey’s publishing career are covered, as well as as much of his personal life as Dery could put together. He lived an interesting life and died at 75 of cardiac arrest, after having previously turned down his doctor’s earlier recommendation of a pacemaker.
Mark Dery obviously did his proper research, combing through decades of Gorey’s personal correspondence and interviews with old friends. Though the subject himself is delightful, this book is a bit dry. He was born in Chicago in 1925, he actually wore the full length fur coats so many of his characters wore, he loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he was gay! So many facts I didn’t know. He loved books and cats and ballet, which you can obviously see in his stuff. If you know any of Gorey’s works, you will not be surprised to find out just how odd the man himself was. Gorey, I was delighted to dive in and see how wrong my high school self was. So many many moons later, when Dad got me an actual biography of Mr. (I normally would never have done such a thing – I was a very good student! But I had senioritis REAL bad.) Then we were supposed to use the facts to write the paper, and use the sources to make a bibliography. This was back in the pre-computer days, children, so our assignment was to go to the library, research our poets using actual books, write one fact per notecard, and then write the source on the back of that notecard. So when I found out that there were no books about Edward Gorey, rather than pick another poet to write about, I decided to make it all up. So fast forward a few years, and I am a snotty soon-to-be English major who thinks I’m smarter than my AP English teacher (she pronounced Albert Camus “Cam-uss”).
We stayed downstairs playing Super Nintendo while the grownups geeked out upstairs, and that evening’s host had a Gashlycrumb Tinies poster hanging in the basement – the rest is history. I memorized the Gashlycrumb Tinies one night when Dad took my brother and me to a science fiction club meeting. In high school, we were supposed to write papers about our favorite poets for senior English class. LONG PERSONAL SIDEBAR (skip to review if you want to miss the high school stories):
He also illustrated a ton of book covers!
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