Yet when Gorey died last week at 75, no one could say just what that work was. His 90-odd illustrated texts, including “The Doubtful Guest” (a penguin in the old manse) and the infanticidal ABC “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” (“M is for Maud who was swept out to sea. N is for Neville who died of ennui”), looked like children’s books. But to readers of any age, his sedulously uninstructive ironies and pointedly unpunished cruelties offered only this comfort: that someone else could know the scary and the strange, and make it, literally, funny as hell.
