I’ve really enjoyed reading Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey. I find myself most interested in the pieces where each individual image is read by itself, like The Listing Attic. The short poems have the feel of a children’s book with their rhyme scheme and attached image, but the content is very much not what a parent would give their child to read. They have a dark humor and and many satirize sociocultural concepts.
Here is an example of one such piece. While the image doesn’t actually show the moment of the death, it shows the preceding events and foreshadows the coming murder. The poem is dark but its combination with the image and the way it is written gives it humor. The page finds humor in an event that should not be seen as humorous, since a servant was killed and the woman goes to the nunnery to repent for her crime. There is also humor in the statues behind the servant mostly destroyed by Plunnery’s use of the cannon, showing that her use of the cannon has been careless in the past. These pages are fun to read and make the reader engage with them.
I also found Gorey’s tendency to play with the form/characteristics of children’s books really interesting. His perversion of this form of text, which we associate with innocence, is surprising, as it breaks cultural expectations of this type of narrative. I think this makes Gorey’s satire more effective. His narratives are effectively subversive because they break our expectations not only in their content, but also in their form.