Edward Gorey is My Blood Type: an appreciation for the artist who made us goth

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Corinne Halbert | February 27, 2025

When I think about Edward Gorey, I think about big outrageous fur coats, striped smoking jackets, bicycle calamities, poisoned aspic, enormous crows with foreboding messages, shadowy visions of Dracula, and a spoonful of arsenic slipped into some poor waifish child’s stone cold porridge at breakfast.

Edward St. John Gorey was born on Feb 22nd, 1925 in Chicago, IL. This was truly a day when a beautiful star made their way onto planet earth. Of course Gorey was a Pisces, not an Aquarius like all those born earlier in the month… No, this brilliant artist with an imagination so enormous, so decorated with stardust and macabre reliquaries, would be a gorgeous water sign. water signs are very connected to their perceptions, always a ton of emotional depth. How lucky we all are that he shared his bountiful gifts of art and enchantment with all of us.

I fell in love with the work of the great Edward Gorey in childhood. Raised by my mother and my grandparents in suburban Massachusetts, I thank god my grandfather had an insatiable love of books, reading and literature, because he passed that obsession right on down to me. Education was one of the most important things to him. His parents, off the boat from Ukraine, traveled to Canada outside of Manitoba, a little town called Pine Falls. Both of his parents had something like a fourth grade level education, I'm not entirely sure if they could read. Their son, my grandfather, just wanted an education. He worked at a paper mill all through high school, ended up going to Harvard's business school and ended up becoming the treasurer of a company. When my brother and I came along, education was the main thing he focused on with us, doing extra lessons and workbooks outside of school, which I loved, getting to spend even more time with him.

His book collection was pretty massive, a lot of atlases, maps, history books, National Geographic, in the den, in the basement. I would go and peruse for hours, I loved looking around in places I probably wasn't supposed to, finding their old Halloween masks and weird books. We had several of Gorey’s books in the house including, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. What future goth would be caught dead without reading these ghastly tales of unsuspecting surmise?!

I went to Catholic school, so there was a lot of focus on good and evil. The language used in mass is always about repenting for your sins, always about shame. Gorey's work blurs those line, subverting the power of evil into something really almost charming and good. Gorey's characters behave badly all the time, but do they ever have shame? Not really, and that is such a refreshing freedom to think about traversing in that world. His work never felt harmful or threatening to me. It always just felt like the game of Clue, a wistful murder mystery.

He created this world that is so missing mysterious and enticing. And it's a puzzle to be solved. there is something of an alphabet within an alphabet to everything he does. You can figure out some of those codings, but I just don't think it can be solved. That's why you keep coming back. You want to figure it out, but you can never know someone's motivation. They're doing something crazy and it seems like you're getting somewhere and it's just like you just keep endlessly unraveling a sweater. Just goes on for all eternity. Then you have your own new messy pile of thread that's just now a weird ball of madness.

In my teenage years I started painting classes at the Cotuit Center of the Arts during the summers on Cape Cod. I was 14 years old when I met my teacher, Jamie Wolf. Jamie was the perfect teacher for me. An extremely talented painter, a little bit of a hippy and a rebel. He blew my mind wide open by introducing me to the world of a real life working artist. With grit, tenacity and passion for his work and his craft. This is where I would make my first serious painting, a watercolor still life of flowers with another artist's piece sitting in the background.

It was thanks to my amazing grandfather Nick, an Aquarius man through and through, for always supporting my dreams and passions in life. He found the art center and spoke with Jamie before I started taking classes at his school. Very sadly years later, the town of Cotuit took the art center away from Jamie and put it under new direction. Perhaps he was just too real for this quaint little New England town, but I owe much of my formative years as a painter to him and his center for helping to shape the artist I would become.

Jamie also happened to be great friends with none other than the incredible, Edward Gorey. They started putting on plays at the art center and one of them was Gorey's, The White Canoe. Much like the rest of his work, this theatrical gem was beautiful, morbid, ethereal, poetic and it transported me to another world, one that only exists beyond the veil.

One of the biggest regrets of my life is that because of my connection to Jamie, I had had the opportunity to meet Mr. Gorey, and being a self absorbed teenager at the time, I flaked out, thinking I’d always have this incredible opportunity, but it did not come to pass.

A few years later, in art school, I decided to major in Film/Video my sophomore year. I was attending Massachusetts College of Art in Boston at the time, and was incredibly blessed to work with several tremendous teachers, including Mark Lapore and Saul Levine. They were very fascinated by what I was doing and both men steered me towards more experimental film and video making. I made a project with some friends at the time, never completed or screened, but I dug up the footage and made a rough edit for this essay's end. It’s based on Gorey’s short philosophical and paradoxical piece, L'Heure Bleue. This story can be found in my favorite Gorey collection, Amphigorey Also.

I have an Edward Gorey tattoo on my back left shoulder. It’s the crow from The Epipleptic Bicycle, who warns the children to “beware of this and that.” Crows and Ravens are some of my favorite animals so this tattoo was a no brainer. Please forgive its blurry, bleeding edge nature, I did get it several decades ago.

Years after my experiences at the Cotuit Center for the Arts and my time at Mass Art I would visit the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port on two completely separate occasions. A sincere bucket list item that I’ll always be grateful I got to check off.

They changed up what the actual exhibit is and the one where they featured his collections was by far my favorite. I’m a bit of a collector myself and to see what this brilliant artist found value in and obsessively hoarded filled me with a joy I know I can't describe in words. He collected all kinds of things! From strange little knickknacks and peculiar objects to outrageously fluffy fur coats. He had a remarkable amount of tarot card decks and other occult items that were probably my favorite things in the exhibit. He had a real mummified hand! Apparently he also had a mummified head but someone ratted him out and the cops confiscated it. He had an actual photograph of Lizzy Borden! That piece really knocked my socks off. I mean, this is my kind of collector.

They had a room in the back that had a bunch of the actual art supplies he used. That was so magical. Looking at little used water color cakes, rusty nib pens, pencils, all sorts of wonderful items. That was very special for me. Hopefully I absorbed some of his otherworldly essence from being around these beautiful objects.

One of Pisces most beautiful traits is their ever expanding and unbridled imagination. They’re ruled by Neptune which controls creativity, intuition, spirituality and illusion and Jupiter, the planet of luck, higher learning, growth and expansion. One of the biggest ways Gorey’s art has impacted me personally, as an artist, is his completely impish and singular imagination, and the ability to execute those absurdly wonderful visions.

I’ve owned this slightly worn copy of Amphigorey Also since the 1990s. This is a book I truly cherish and could never part with intentionally. I’ve looked at it when I was a lunatic teenager, tripping on acid. I’ve read it probably dozens of times over the years. As a book collector, you always have a small corral of favorite books and this little gem always makes the cut, I'm comforted just knowing of its presence.

It starts out with The Utter Zoo, a frolic through a catalogue of charming and mythical creatures with the most delightful dysfunctions. “The Kwongdzu has enormous claws; Its character is full of flaws.” I can relate to the Kwongdzu…

And as if Gorey’s writing wasn’t brilliant and unique enough, my god, have you seen his artwork?!? He fostered a style so immediately recognizable and so effortless looking, it’s like his pen was touched with a magic spell. Highly detailed pen markings with a veritable alphabet of textures and line weights. At times he would fill the whole composition overflowing with line work and in the next panel leave it mostly negative space. When you marry these musings from another dimension, another world with artwork so magnetic and wistful, you cannot help but to completely tumble into this imaginary world that we are so lucky to get to experience.

Thank you Edward Gorey, for your radiant imagination and your enduring artistic luminosity. My life is much richer because of the experience of absorbing your work. It will continue to enchant and amaze generations of children, artists and adults for centuries to come. Well, as long as the human race can survive itself. When I look up at the stars, I know you’re out there, shining brighter than the sun.