bloodygranuaile

 

Cautionary Tales for Children falls somewhere between Ogden Nash poems and The Gashleycrumb Tinies, being a series of extremely British humorous poems about terrible things happening to disobedient young'uns. One of the tales, "Matilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death," was familiar to me; it must have been in some anthology or other that I read when I was younger. Most of the stories give away their endings in the titles, and also all the children have absurdly British names, which is probably unsurprising coming from an author afflicted with the appellation "Hilaire Belloc." 

 

Anyway, the illustrations are cute, the deaths are grisly, the rhymes are sometimes a little bit slant, and the capitalization is decidedly of the Emphatic variety. My biggest criticism is that the two most boring tales, in which the children are merely reprimanded instead of dying horribly, are put right at the back, so the book ends on a bit of a flat note. Other than that, it's pretty much exactly what I wanted.

 

The Glorious Nosebleed has nothing much to do with the nosebleed illustrated on the front cover, which does appear to be quite intense. The book is an abecedaire, much like the excellent The Gashleycrumb Tinies, except instead of the "A is for..." phrasing, each page is a sentence that ends with an adverb, and the adverbs, which are capitalized so you know they're important, go through the alphabet. They are all quite charming and silly and I started laughing actually out loud around "He fell off the pier Inadvertently" and it only got funnier from there. The illustrations are peak Gorey, with women in patterned drop-waist dresses and men in big old fur coats much like Gorey's (there even appears to be an author cameo right at the end), and lots of really exquisitely patterned carpets and wallpapers. 

 

Reading so much Gorey in such a short period of time also gave me the itch to sketch, a thing I have not done in more than a decade, but I took a stab at it with little Darkboy Zaraz and I feel better? I've really been in quit a pit lately about not doing anything creative for months and going to the Gorey house sort of made it worse, so it was good to quit whining and do even a tiny thing. 

 

Anyway, I just want things to be whimsical and delightful and gothy all the time; why is that so hard?