It is, for instance, no surprise that Gorey's favorite reading should fall under the category he calls the 'sinister cozy.' In his interview with Clifford Ross (the first part of The World of Edward Gorey) the artist admits to having devoured all of Agatha Christie's mysteries at least five times.

And admirers of Gorey's little albums, gathered in three omnibus volumes ( Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too and Amphigorey Also), know that his pictures suggest, like episodes from a fin de siècle version of The X-Files, that 'much more is happening out there than we are aware of.'

'Beware of this and that,' warns a droopy raven in The Epiplectic Bicycle. A very disturbed couple, with a particularly sanguinary hobby, meet 'at a Self-Help Institute lecture on the Evils of the Decimal System.' An opera fan named Jasper Ankle grows increasingly insane, dispensing with the rivals and lovers of his favorite diva. For the most part, everyone strikes poses, like the more histrionic characters in one of the gloomier plays of Chekhov.Ĭity life is no better, and can in fact prove far more vicious. Furniture runs to divans, large urns, gazebos and allegorical garden sculpture, such as the oft-admired 'statue of Corrupted Endeavor.' Down the lonely hallways one may, from time to time, glimpse a newt-like beast or a poltergeist or possibly a dogged policeman on the trail of a murderess. He also has, of course, delighted many a New Yorker reader with his macabre cartoons. That introductory sequence for Mystery! is probably the artist-illustrator's most recognizable work. In Gorey country, ancestral manors, like the stately homes glimpsed in opening titles for the PBS series Mystery!, are usually inhabited by languid, swooning flappers and mustachioed Edwardian gentlemen with a taste for brocaded dressing gowns or heavy fur coats. To look at an Edward Gorey drawing is to cross into a turn-of-the-century twilight zone, a faded black-and-gray realm where bats-or possibly umbrellas-swoop above the shrubbery, buildings appear as attractive and sturdily built as the House of Usher, and everything feels autumnal, crepuscular, rainswept and more than a little menacing.

Edward gorey amphigorey also