Article on Edward Gorey:

NEWS bulletin from the spirit world: The specter of Edward Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, is haunting our collective unconscious.

In a sense that’s as it should be; Gorey was born to be posthumous. His poisonously funny little picture books -- deadpan accounts of murder, disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in a voice that affects the world-weary tone of British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett -- established him as the master of high-camp macabre. Told in verse and illustrated in a style that crosses Surrealism with the Victorian true-crime gazette, Gorey stories are set in some unmistakably British place, in a time that is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian and Jazz Age all at once.
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Gorey illustrations are even becoming voguish as tattoos. Last year the ninth-season "American Idol" finalist Siobhan Magnus had a biceps tattoo of Death playing nanny to a flock of soon-to-be-doomed children, from "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," Gorey’s grimly funny alphabet book.
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Attendance has been climbing steadily at the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Mass., and curators of the first major traveling exhibition of Gorey’s original art, "Elegant Enigmas" -- originally shown at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., and now on view at the Boston Athenaeum -- have been stunned by the enthusiasm surrounding the show.

"I knew Gorey had a wide following, but I had no idea of the mania," said David Dearinger, an Athenaeum curator, before the exhibition opened there in February. News media inquiries and calls from the public had been coming in for months, he said then, "and the show isn’t even here yet." Since the opening, he said last month, "the response has been phenomenal." 

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Undoubtedly such romanticized visions of a more decorous, dapper past, which also inform the neo-Victorian and neo-Edwardian street styles of goths and steampunks, have as much to do with escapism as historical fact.