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Title: Amphigorey Also
ISBN: 0156056720
Author:
Edward Gorey
Publicate Date: 1993-04-01
Publish: 1993-04-01
List Price: $22.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $4.99
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $2.40
Amazon Merchant Price: $14.96
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Great, Also
This compilation, being the third in the series, is naturally the weakest of the lot, but it still contains some absolutely enchanting bits of morbidity, including The Blue Aspic, The Glorious Nosebleedand The Loathsome Couple.
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2: Deadworry
Edward Gorey is probably best known for the animations that precede Mystery, on PBS. His cartoons have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, and he has published a massive number of books. His Amphigorey series (Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too, Amphigorey Also) collects his works in omnibus form.
Amphigorey Also is the third in the series. It is a perfect introduction for those not familiar with Gorey's work. The book contains seventeen chapters, which are as follows:
The Utter Zoo
The Blue Aspic
The Epileptic Bicycle
The Sopping Thursday
The Grand Passion
Les Passementeries Horribles
The Eclectic Abecedarium
L'Heure bleue
The Broken Spoke
The Awdrey-Gore Legacy
The Glorious Nosebleed
The Loathsome Couple
The Green Beads
Les Urnes Utiles
The Stupid Joke
The Prune People
The Tuning Fork
Each section is comprised of Gorey's lovely, macabre and often startling cartoons, and his brilliantly clever captions. Gorey has a dark sense of humor. We are talking here about gallows humor. Death pervades his work. Subjects that run through his oeuvre are infanticide, madness, murder, death in general, rain, umbrellas, revenge, and endless word play.
Gorey seems obsessed with his own name. I find it fascinating that he constantly plays about with creating anagrams of Edward Gorey. A few that I counted in Amphigorey were: Dogear Wryde, G.E. Deadworry, Awdrey Gore, E.G. Deadworry, Waredo Dyrge, Deary Rewdgo. There are also near anagrams such as Regera Dowdy. But then, these shouldn't really count.
Gorey's word play builds itself into the structure of some of the chapters. Several chapters are odd alphabets. The first of these is "The Utter Zoo". Each panel and caption describes an animal, whose name begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. These animals exist only in the warped mind of our author. He has imagined animals much stranger than anything to be found in a real zoo. These creatures range from the neat Ampoo to the tragically extinct Zote.
The best of Gorey's alphabets is "The Glorious Nosebleed". Each caption contains a different adverb. The illustrations are glorious, dark, and sinister. The captions are often strikingly funny, and a bit weird: "The creature regarded them balefully", "He exposed himself lewdly", "It was in the trunk presumably". These little vignettes are beautiful, and stunning, as well as being likely to offend a large section of the public.
"The Prune People" is a strange little series of drawings, sans captions, which depict people who have prunes in place of their heads. I honestly can't think of more to say about except this: you will find yourself drawn back to these drawings again and again. I least, I was.
The best of the chapters is "The Loathsome Couple". In this macabre tale Harold and Mona kill children for amusement. The couple were both abused as children. They find each other as adults. They find themselves incapable of sexual relations, and instead turn to murdering children for recreation. This is not a tale for everyone. Most will find themselves deeply offended by this story. But, for those who can recognize the stark beauty, and the deeper meaning in Gorey's words, this is a gem. It is a story to rival anything from the Brothers Grimm (I speak here not of the sanitized fairy tales, but of the gore soaked original's). Gorey's drawings are at their best here. One panel depicts Harold luring a child to his doom. Gorey has no sympathy for any of the characters in this picture (of course, he does have sympathy for all of his characters, it is simply that he chooses not to portray it in this drawing). He creates them was worn, lined, ugly beings who are part of a dreadful and ugly world.
Another story of note is "The Blue Aspic". It is the story of Jasper Ankle. Jasper is an opera fan. Perhaps too much of a fan. He murders to place his favorite singer in a starring role. He ignores his responsibilities until he losses his job. He is placed in an asylum, where he has no access to a turntable on which to play his beloved opera records. As he escapes, his beautiful records are broken. It ends badly. We would expect no less. And, it rains a lot.
Those are the only hints I will provide. I fear that I may be spoiling the stories that I have discussed, and do not wish to spoil the rest. This is a book that must be discovered page, by lovely page. Gorey manages to amaze, surprise, and shock again and again. Most people will, I fear, close this book after the first few pages. They will shudder, restrain revulsion, and try to wipe it from their memories. But for a select few of us, this book will delight for years.
I highly recommend Amphigorey Also. However, I offer this caveat: those with weak stomachs, puritanical outlooks, prudish demeanors, and easily offended sensibilities should beware. If you can't laugh at death, then don't bother* You have been warned.
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3: Brilliant ideas spoiled by tiny pictures
The books in this series (Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too and this one) benefit from the warped wit of Gorey, but the size of the images is so small that it becomes difficult to make out the fine details. I like to read them to my kids (ages 9 and 12) but we have to be all scrunched together to make out the visuals.
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4: Perhaps the most consistently entertaining of the Gorey anthologies
AMPHIGOREY ALSO is another compendium of Edward Gorey's stories in the form of pen-and-ink drawings with pithy captions. While it doesn't contain his most notorious book--THE GASHLYCRUMB TINIES in the first AMPHIGOREY, I found this to be the most consistent amusing of his three anthologies.
The works here are of several different styles. You have relatively substantial stories, such as THE BLUE ASPIC. This tells the tragic love of the deranged fan Jasper Ankle for the diva soprano Ortenzia Caviglia and is full of jokes that will delight opera cognoscenti while probably eluding all else. Also in this category is THE LOATHSOME COUPLE, a delightfully droll tale of a man and woman who fall in love and discover their mutual passion is murdering children, and THE GREEN BEADS where an impoverished child meets a madwoman who turns out to be his long-lost grandmother.
Another style is that of drawings on some theme. The first book in the anthology, THE UTTER ZOO, is such a work, a collection of twenty-six drawings of imaginary creatures somewhat in the vein of Borges' BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS. Then there's THE BROKEN SPOKE, purporting to be a collection of postcards about cycling, which is wickedly funny.
One will also find writings of totally random humour that explain the rumour that Gorey hit the bottle pretty hard. These include THE PRUNE PEOPLE, a collection of drawings where people go about their daily business and the only off thing is that they have prunes on their necks instead of heads. Also in this vein is LES PASSEMENTERIES HORRIBLES, where various people concentrate on some task unsuspecting that a gigantic passementerie is sneaking up behind them.
This is probably the best anthology to start with in uncovering Gorey's work--although I feel THE OTHER STATUE available on its out from Harcourt is the best introduction to this droll author. This anthology is certainly no collection of dead weight, and the quality of the reproductions is higher than in the other two.
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5: Gorey and ghastly
The much-lamented Edward Gorey specialized in intricate, ominous pen-and-ink drawings. Doomed Victorian opera singers, alligators, time-bending bicycles, and plenty of creatures strange and grotesque fill "Amphigorey Also," a collection of Gorey's quirky work. Included is the cute "Utter Zoo" ("The Ippagoggy has a taste/for every kind of glue and paste"), the tragic "Blue Aspic" (a crazed, impoverished man stalks an opera diva), the amusing "Sopping Thursday" (Bruno the dog looks for his master's umbrella), and the delicious revenge fairy tale "The Tuning Fork." The highlight is the "Awdrey Gore Legacy," a deliciously warped murder mystery. Some of the offerings are kind of befuddling, like the disjointed conversation between a mustachioed man and a woman with a geisha hairdo, or the "Eclectic Abcedarium" with its too tiny pictures. But most of them, like "Les Passementeries Horribles" (in which embroidery and tassels act ominous) or "The Prune People" (which is pictures of people with prunes for heads) are amusing even if they make no sense. Edward Gorey's delicate pen-and-ink illustrations would be fun even if he didn't possess the morbid whimsy that fills almost every story. Okay, if you are easily offended, then the "Loathsome Couple" will offend you with a pair of crazy killers lure, photograph and murder small children ("They spent the better part of the night murdering the child in various ways"). But he did so in the best of bad taste. His slightly warped sensibilities were also shown in the chilly skies and barren-looking outdoors, cute children and haughty adults in Victorian attire. There are occasional splashes of color (like the blue backdrops of "L'heure Bleue"), but even then it tends to be a bit eerie and faded like old photographs. The eerie whimsy of Edward Gorey's work is alive and well in "Amphigorey Also." A few of the works are duds, but overall it's a strange and wonderful ride.
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