What better way to restart blogging again, than with one of my favourite illustrators Edward Gorey, born today 22nd February 1925.
A man who is probably most famous for his little illustrated book of twenty-six children dying sudden and disturbing deaths. And I’m still trying to work out why I fell in love with it immediately; was it the dark humour or that he had taken something disturbing – the death of children- and made it delightful?
I will probably never know, but from the moment I started to read more of his wonderfully strange and bizarre books, he became my master of understated horror; his work full of weird, gaunt and thin characters- the perfect mood for a geeky teenage girl!
He made the conventional curious, cats in clothing, women in fancy dress, haunting tea-cosys, mythical creatures and treacherous villains. Once saying he wanted “to make everyone as un-easy as possible” no more so that in “The Loathsome Couple” about two child murderers and their casually miserable marriage.
To me there will never be anyone so wonderfully strange, odd and bizarre as Edward Gorey. Illustrating and writing over 100 books in his career. Bringing a new twist to HG Wells “War of the Worlds” and winning a Tony Award for his work on the 1977 Broadway production of “Dracula”.
Turning the sets into a work of art, it is breath-taking like a massive children’s book had been opened on stage. Can you imagine all of those meticulously unsettling little sketches in motion? It is stunning, and clever, and quite terribly creepy!
And whilst it is difficult to see in these pictures the details in the set design for the “Toy Theatre” are amazing; the morbid dolls in Seward’s library, the fangs on the skulls in Lucy’s bedroom, the bat cradling a zombie almost lovingly in Dracula’s tomb—make looking at the set up close entertainment enough. But there’s so much more to do with it.
The stage is set for your own revival of “Dracula”
If you want Dracula to avoid the stake at the end of the story? You can! Did you wish the maid had a larger role? Make her the star! Did you always imagine it as a musical? Get ready to belt it out.
As for me, today I will just sit back, maybe with one of his many books and imagine what character I would have been in one of his stories and wonder what tragic end he would have given me, I do hope that it would have been disastrous!!
or A for ABI
Dark and Obscure 