Vintage Edward Gorey. Awesome.....as expected. But also bizarre.....as expected. ( )

Vintage Edward Gorey. Awesome.....as expected. But also bizarre.....as expected. ( )

Vintage Edward Gorey. Awesome.....as expected. But also bizarre.....as expected. ( )

Vintage Edward Gorey. Awesome.....as expected. But also bizarre.....as expected. ( )

Can't believe I'm only giving four stars to an Edward Gorey book -- and yes, I know that four stars is a fantastic review if you actually read the definitions that pop up when you hold the cursor by the rating bar. But we're talking about Edward Gorey here.

This is a book that was put together by his estate. He wrote it, and the drawings are also by him; but the text and images weren't meant to go together. Instead, the pictures were taken from his body of work to accompany a story that he wrote but never got around to illustrating.

The story itself is brilliant. But I found it difficult to read initially, because I was so distracted by the pictures. Whoever put this book together was patient and and clever; but it just doesn't work because it can't. Pictures aren't accidental accompaniments to a text in any book, but that goes triple for Edward Gorey's work.

I'm sure there are plenty of other unpublished and similarly unillustrated Gorey works. I wish that his estate would just go ahead and publish them as a collection of strange stories. Edward Gorey was as brilliant a writer as he was a visual artist, and I think it would be a strangely wonderful experience to read his words without benefit of images. It would definitely be better than another cobbling-together of this sort. ( )