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In today’s Halloween edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jill Sternhauer examines the strange and murderous art of Edward Gorey: Consider Gorey’s second book, The Listing Attic, which came out in 1954. Small, thin, and nearly square, like all of Gorey’s original output, The Listing Attic could be mistaken for a children’s book. It’s comprised of limericks and accompanying illustrations, also apparently an innocuous form, if you didn’t know better. But from the second poem, which tells of a woman who throws her two-year-old child at the ceiling, you begin to know better. And then comes the third entry, for which nothing quite prepares you: They had come in the fugue to the strettoWhen a dark, bearded man from a ghetto            Slipped forward and grabbed            Her tresses and stabbedHer to death with a rusty stiletto. Want more? Click here to read The Gorey Details.

In today’s Halloween edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jill Sternhauer examines the strange and murderous art of Edward Gorey:

Consider Gorey’s second book, The Listing Attic, which came out in 1954. Small, thin, and nearly square, like all of Gorey’s original output, The Listing Attic could be mistaken for a children’s book. It’s comprised of limericks and accompanying illustrations, also apparently an innocuous form, if you didn’t know better. But from the second poem, which tells of a woman who throws her two-year-old child at the ceiling, you begin to know better. And then comes the third entry, for which nothing quite prepares you:

They had come in the fugue to the stretto
When a dark, bearded man from a ghetto
            Slipped forward and grabbed
            Her tresses and stabbed
Her to death with a rusty stiletto.

Want more? Click here to read The Gorey Details.

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    Consider Gorey’s second book, The Listing Attic, which came out in 1954. Small, thin, and nearly square, like all of...
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    My dad read Edward Gorey books to me the way most people read picture books to their children, which goes a long way...
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