Furniture runs to divans, large urns, gazebos and allegorical garden sculpture, such as the oft-admired "statue of Corrupted Endeavor." Down the lonely hallways one may, from time to time, glimpse a newt-like beast or a poltergeist or possibly a dogged policeman on the trail of a murderess. He also has, of course, delighted many a New Yorker reader with his macabre cartoons.
That introductory sequence for Mystery! is probably the artist-illustrator's most recognizable work. In Gorey country, ancestral manors, like the stately homes glimpsed in opening titles for the PBS series Mystery!, are usually inhabited by languid, swooning flappers and mustachioed Edwardian gentlemen with a taste for brocaded dressing gowns or heavy fur coats. To look at an Edward Gorey drawing is to cross into a turn-of-the-century twilight zone, a faded black-and-gray realm where bats-or possibly umbrellas-swoop above the shrubbery, buildings appear as attractive and sturdily built as the House of Usher, and everything feels autumnal, crepuscular, rainswept and more than a little menacing.
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