"To look at an Edward Gorey drawing is to cross into a turn-of-the-century twilight zone," wrote Michael Dirda in a Smithsonian review of The World of Edward Gorey," 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, rain-swept and more than a little menacing." Amy Hanson, writing in Biblio, further delineated that strange world "which teems with unknown creatures: sinister mustachioed gentlemen and elegant women in a place out of time, the Roaring Twenties crossed with Edwardian London, and an ominous, stretching landscape awash with urns, alligators, and unfortunate children meeting even more unfortunate ends." Hanson went on to observe, "Gorey's images do not go lightly into the realms of forgotten memory. They stick, and they stick well." That sticking power comes, not a little, from Gorey's "vivid words...