Goth father

One day in the late 1970s, one of my housemates at Oberlin College shared with me her consuming obsession: the queer little books of an artist and writer named Edward Gorey, who rendered depictions of his own macabre preoccupations — such as fascinations with strange, unidentifiable little animals and children who met sudden, unfortunate ends — in exquisitely wrought pen-and-ink drawings that looked like etchings.

“The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” for example, was an abecedarium of fatal mishaps running the gamut from “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs” (note the poor little girl’s outstretched fingers failing to grip the carpet firmly enough to arrest her descent) through “Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin” (and evidently perished in a bleak furnished room with her favorite doll, which itself had wasted away into a tiny skeleton). Other books, such as “The Curious Sofa,” highlighted the author’s pitch-perfect ear for the evasions of language, juxtaposing absurdly overwrought euphemisms (such as his coy description of one of his louche characters’ “ingeniously constructed bathing slip”) with an ever-present sense of looming catastrophe.

His books spoke in the chiding tone and sing-song meters of Edwardian-era manuals for the moral instruction of children, but there was clearly something darker afoot than the author counseling toddlers not to swallow tacks, play catch with an awl, or guzzle lye. Gorey’s exuberant delight in subverting hypocrisy and putting innocents in harm’s way made even the self-conscious ghoulishness of cartoonist Charles Addams, of “Addams Family” fame, seem kitschy and kid-friendly by comparison. Instead of rewarding good or wise behavior and punishing evil, the forces at large in Gorey’s universe could be terribly capricious, dispatching a hapless toddler with an ill-placed bog or a nest of hungry mice.

But who was the strange man behind these haunted couplets and haunting images? Gorey’s efforts to deflect such importunately direct questions included the extensive use of pseudonyms, many of which were anagrams for his real name, such as Ogdred Weary and E.G. Deadworry. The book jackets weren’t much help, but some truths seemed self-evident from the style of the art: Gorey (even his real name was uncannily perfect) was almost certainly British, probably of late 19th century vintage, and likely already dead.

In fact, none of these things were true, as Mark Dery explains in his provocative new biography of the artist, “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey.” Despite his lifelong Anglophilia and habit of giving his characters “preposterously British” names (as Dery aptly puts it) like Basil and Quentin, Gorey was a native Chicagoan, born in 1925, who spent most of his adult life in Manhattan and his later years in an overgrown house full of cats on Cape Cod. And instead of being a fusty old Edwardian misanthrope, Gorey was a flamboyant dandy, piercing his ears, bejeweling his fingers with coiling silver snakes, cultivating a hoary thatch of beard worthy of Walt Whitman, and sporting a full-length fur coat — with Keds! — to performances by the New York City Ballet, which he attended with the fervor of a Deadhead, seeing eight performances a week, five months out of the year, for the three decades that George Balanchine was the company’s artistic director.

Dery makes a convincing case that Gorey was the true godfather

Born to Be Posthumous

of Goth, inspiring a generation of pop culture memento mori, from the Imax-scale nightmares of Tim Burton, to the funereal trappings of the video for Nine Inch Nails’ “The Perfect Drug,” to the travails of Lemony Snicket (the nom de plume of author Daniel Handler, who bluntly admits, “I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey”). While previous collections of Dery’s essays, such as “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts,” probed the emergence of the cyberculture, culture hacking, Afrofuturism (a term Dery coined long before it became the guiding aesthetic of “Black Panther”) and other frissons of postmodern life, “Born to Be Posthumous” is his most sustained effort, and an ideal marriage of author and subject.

As was Gorey himself, Dery is an omnivorous reader with a gift for aphoristic observations, as when he describes the author’s distinctive voice as “a deadpan that never cracks, but with a droll undertow.” He plumbs a deep well of sources for the book, including Gorey’s prolific correspondence, interviews with surviving relatives, and an impressive armamentarium of subversive critical perspectives ranging from Dada to Tao. Only occasionally does Dery’s critsplaining become a bit tedious, as when he accuses young Gorey of being unable to resist “overegging the pudding of his prose style” as an undergraduate at Harvard — a statement that could equally apply to itself.

Crucially, “Born to Be Posthumous” accurately locates Gorey’s legacy in the pantheon of gay culture, which was anything but a straightforward process, because the late artist/author was both one of the most outrageous and influential queens of the 20th century, and an early avatar of asexuality (“ace,” as the kids say now) as a lifestyle. When Gorey was overegging his prose pudding at Harvard, his roommate was the poet Frank O’Hara, and the two men would form, as Dery puts it, a “two-man counterculture.” To claim that the mature Gorey’s art included coded messages meant for other gay eyes would be a laughable understatement; so many subliminal phalluses appear in his oeuvre that they’re “like Ninas in a Hirschfeld,” said cultural historian M.G. Lord. In his reclusive, routinized and strictly compartmentalized personal life, however, Gorey eschewed the whole mishegoss of sex and romance, with just a few exceptions chronicled by Dery, particularly once he quit his New York City apartment upon Balanchine’s retirement.

Ultimately, Dery concludes, Gorey was neither a gay artist, nor a closeted artist, nor an asexual artist. He was, like the mythical Zote in one of Gorey’s bestiaries, a species of one. We shall not see his like again, and Dery has set the standard for a comprehensive appraisal of his legacy.

Steve Silberman is the author of “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com.