Most chilling of all is poor Hector, “done in by a thug.” Except for a pair of black gloves that mark the assailant as the macabre counterpart to The Lorax’s Once-ler, the thug’s horrifying dimensions are masked by a pair of Roman columns. Victor, his darkened silhouette planted in the middle of train tracks. Ida, reaching toward her reflection in an inky black lake. A few pages-“ K is for KATE who was struck by an axe” and “ R is for RHODA consumed by a fire” chief among them-are predicated on an ironic grisliness, but the spookiest Gashlycrumb Tinies passages are those where the ghastly developments are lurking just beyond the frame. Fields-and either pictured shortly before or just after the fact. The book would be a ghoulish endeavor, if not for the way its characters’ deaths are treated as utterly mundane-“ Z is for ZILLAH who drank too much gin,” as if the little tyke were played by W.C. The artist/author’s most famous work, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, introduces and summarily offs 26 children in the space of 13 rhyming couplets. Edward Gorey provides a perfect example of this principle.
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