Where to start with Edward Gorey? He wrote 116 books of his own, illustrated more than 500 for other writers and left behind boxes of manuscripts he simply didn’t have time to finish. If you’re wondering, as I did, which are the essential Edward Gorey stories, you’ve got a tough job ahead of you.
The easiest answer, of course, is to pick up one (or all) of his Amphigorey collections. Each of these volumes collects more than a dozen of Edward Gorey’s must-read illustrated stories. They’re affordable and you can find them everywhere, though the stories are packed tight with little room to breathe. Not to mention complaints about the quality of the reproductions from the man himself. (It’s why there are no images in this post. Apart from being hard to come by fairly, I doubt Gorey would approve of them all pixelated on a screen.)
So, you’re still unsure which Edward Gorey stories to start with. Or you’re wondering which individual editions are worth searching for. Here, I’ve combined the stories that have most stuck with me and those I see others bring up most often. You’ll find no better initiation into his unique writing and illustration than these 11 stories.
Writer and illustrator Edward Gorey would have celebrated his 100th birthday on 22 February 2025. Join the Gothic Dispatch in admiring the life and work, influences and influence of the Grandfather of Goth.
The Unstrung Harp
There are writers who write what they know and then there was Edward Gorey. At 28 and with no published works under his belt, he wrote his first book. The Unstrung Harp is a musing on the solitary life of a writer and the even more isolating, surreal experiences that come after publication. “I thought [it] was a neat trick,” Gorey said in a 1984 interview for The Boston Globe Magazine. “I had never written a book before, and it was all about writing, which I didn’t know anything about.”
The Doubtful Guest
Despite often wishing that his publishers had the nerve to market his books to children (they usually didn’t), Gorey never had children and even occasionally lost touch with friends who did. Many of his works contain children who meet violent ends. But perhaps none so well suggest the man’s real feelings as The Doubtful Guest. The book features an alien, sneaker-wearing creature arriving at a family home and, for 17 years, silently and inexplicably disrupting just about everything. It was dedicated to a friend of Gorey’s who, at the time, had a toddler.
The Curious Sofa
“I think, in a way, The Curious Sofa is possibly the cleverest book I ever did.” So Gorey told Robert Dahlin for Conversations with Writers. It really is a brilliant parody of Victorian pornography (I imagine). It’s here that we really start seeing Gorey’s gift for leaving things out – the characters’ surreal, nonsensical acts somehow leave both everything and nothing to the imagination. In fact, it so expertly dodges explicitness that Gorey claimed to know children who said it was their favourite of his books. (As a bonus, The Curious Sofa is also the first time Gorey used an anagrammatic pen name – Ogdred Weary. He’d go on to invent many more.)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
My first brush with Edward Gorey (and his most essential work by my judgement) came with The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Full disclosure: this is one of my favourite books. I can’t imagine finding Gorey by any other route, though I’m sure it must be possible. His first abecedarium recounts in rhyming couplets the silly, sinister deaths of 26 children with illustrations that stop just short of the fateful moment. Instead, we readers finish the job – imagining the scene just seconds after Amy falls down the stairs or Basil is assaulted by bears.
The West Wing
Though Gorey preferred to think of himself as a writer first, his story The West Wing contains no words. Instead, it’s an unsettling mystery montage. Empty rooms, pensive characters and household ornaments simultaneously beg to be examined closely for clues and promise that you won’t like what you find. Yet every scene is composed as though the reader has arrived just too late – over and over and over again.
The Gilded Bat
The Gilded Bat combines many of the man’s loves and several of the essential components of a great Edward Gorey piece. Ballet, which he fervently attended in New York. The imagery of French filmmaker Louis Feuillade. Intricate patterns on clothes, carpets and wallpaper. The result is perhaps one of his most painstakingly detailed stories, following the colourful career and tedious life of a ballerina from the end of the Edwardian era to the 1920s – the same period that saw the rise of modernist ballet, of which Gorey was a lifelong admirer. Like The Unstrung Harp, it’s a melancholy account of the blood, sweat and tears that go into making anything.
The Deranged Cousins
“That story,” Gorey told Dick Cavett in 1977, “was taken from life.” By this time, the writer was splitting his time between New York and Cape Cod. There, he would break up his reclusive episodes with walks with family. In The Deranged Cousins, Rose Marshmary, Mary Rosemarsh and Marsh Maryrose (the latter of which, we can assume, is based on Gorey himself) collect odds and ends from a beach, practice religious mania and murder one another.
The Blue Aspic
As singer Ortenzia Caviglia’s star rises, the life of fan Jasper Ankle descends into isolation and psychosis. A companion piece toThe Gilded Bat, The Blue Aspic puts the world of opera through Gorey’s melancholy lens. He uses it to riff on unrequited love and fanaticism, predicting the rise of the stalker-fan. It’s made funnier when you consider that, despite Gorey’s rising fame at this time, his own obsession with the performing arts meant that he probably saw himself closer to the character of Jasper.
The Awdrey-Gore Legacy
If the word “story” seems like a bad fit for most of Gorey’s works, it’s outright wrong for The Awdrey-Gore Legacy. This collection of infernal red herrings is Gorey’s most adoring tribute to mystery writer Agatha Christie – inviting the reader as she did to play detective and storyteller. There is, to my understanding, no clear answer. But your reading may prove more insightful.
The Loathsome Couple
“I’m all for goofy, elegant murder,” Gorey told an interviewer. The Loathsome Couple, however, is not that. Based on the Moors Murders that haunted the British newspapers in the 1960s, Gorey keeps the story at a distance by placing it in his usual Victorian setting. Although a lifelong fan of true crime and, by this time, an accomplished child murderer in his own right, the Moors Murders really disturbed him. “It became the one text I felt compelled to write.” It’s a compelling read, too, and essential for understanding Edward Gorey. It’s just far less fun than any of his other works.
Les Urnes Utiles
Little has been said about this final recommendation. Gorey seems only to have mentioned it in one or two interviews and his interviewers seem never to ask. It’s another of his wordless collections of tableaux, each a grand, brooding urn with a unique, everyday use – storing croquet balls or memorialising the year of 1832. Perhaps saying too much about it would foil the mystery. I suppose that could be said of all Gorey’s work. So too could this comment from Mark Dery: “Gorey’s was a magic that was black, white and silent.”
I put this list together with great help from two books, which both offer even more insights into and recommendations of Gorey’s essential works.
- Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey edited by Karen Wilkin, 2002
- Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery, 2018
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