Born to Be Posthumous

The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

By: Mark Dery

Narrated by: Adam Sims

Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

The definitive biography of Edward Gorey, the eccentric master of macabre nonsense.

From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.

But who was this man, who lived with more than 20,000 books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known - in the late 1940s, no less - to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes - but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?

He published more than 100 books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others.

At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.

Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to Be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.

©2018 Mark Dery (P)2018 Hachette Audio

I now feel as though I knew him as well as anyone.

Truly illuminating. Having admitted his illustrations since the late 90's I finally visited the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod and immediately needed to learn all I could about the man. This book was wonderful in its ::ahem:: illustration of the man so unique and yet so human. I enjoyed this work immensely!

Fresh modern worthy

I completely enjoyed this book. Narrators performance had just the right crispness and irreverence. What a wonderful experience that we can enjoy Gorey and contextualize him in LGBTQ atheistics and culture and at the same time allow him his fabulous mysteries of identity. Highly recommend both the book and the actor ,

Appreciated the Biography

Admittedly a difficult person on whom to collect information, Mark Dery has done an excellent job of seeking it out. I also bought the book, which I will pass on, so I could see some of the drawing he was writing about. It's a long book and I'm glad to have done that - the font in the book is so tiny I would have given up! I came away with a greater picture of the man (as much as anyone might be able) behind the Art.
I was a little bored with the narrator. I felt his tone was a bit newscaster-ish. That being said, I'm also not exactly sure how this biography should be read.

Tiring to listen to.

I loved Edward Gorey's art and his life was very interesting, but I found listening to Adam Sims rather exhausting. A little too intense and overworked.

Goreyaphile

I guess I don’t really care what sexual orientation an author or artist is. I have always appreciated his creative output regardless of his sexuality. The reason I gave the story a four star rating instead of five stars is that some areas of the book seemed to obsessively reiterate Edward Gorey’s s.o.

lovely book about the reader mispronounced a lot

this was a lovely book but the reader mispronounced many words. for example the word m o r e s and the word t a o. I'm surprised that the producer did not catch this.

Spoiler: he liked cats.

If you’ve gotten this far in reading reviews, just go ahead and buy it already. Dery does a great job summing up an elusive and complex man and somehow manages to do it without reducing Gorey to a Gorey-esque caricature. I wish the book had been twice as long.

Gorey is amazing but...

But he really didn't need the longest wikipedia in history about him, obsessively repetitive about his sexuality to a creepy degree.
It was a very enjoyable read at first... well written, interesting facts and interviews. Then it drags forever and repeats constantly, as if the author wanted to dig some secret trauma from Gorey's sexuality privacy.

Tedious read to the very end.

Hang your head, Audible

Arghh! So many mispronunciations! Where was the producer/director? Where was the narrator during literature, philosophy, and/or film class discussions? I do give the narrator props for including footnotes seamlessly.

The book, itself, comes off as an over-long, overwrought essay hyper-focused on Gorey's sexuality. Despite chapters ordered chronologically, it feels disorganized. Some cruel-to-be-kind editor needed to tell the author that every single bit of his research did not need to be included in the narrative.

If it weren't for the quirky and fascinating topic of this book, it would have been a DNF for me.

If it was half as long, it would be twice as good.

A long list of names and unnecessary display of complicated words, otherwise fine.

It very mush seems like the author wants to show off his vocabulary and knowledge of people. I rather think that a cluster of sentences with pretty words that repeat the same thing in a more, or EVEN more complicated way, doesn't prove that you as a writer have understood something. It just shows that you are pretentious. Furthermore, it most likely does not help the average reader come to terms with it.

The text is absolutely packed with names. I assume it's an attempt to anchor Gorey's character and work; who influenced him and vice versa. However, if you as a reader are not familiar with the work of the name dropped people, it just serves to make the text longer, almost unbearably so.

Then there are the Freudian analysis of Gorey's sex-life... It seems more than a bit obnoxious to try and dig so deep into a subject that according to the person in question, did not matter to him.

I really wanted to like this book, but it was hard. I really love the work of Edward Gorey, and I did learn more about him, but the book could do with a rather harsh editing.