Surreal nonsense …

… The Gorey Details — Review: 'Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey' by Mark Dery. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… if there is a single line from which Edward Gorey's humor descends, it's the minor but irrepressible set of sly humorists in the decades before Oscar Wilde—the droll Victorians at the peak of British confidence. W.S. Gilbert and Edward Lear. Dickens, too, on occasion. Lewis Carroll. The impulse that in French expressed itself as surrealism took in English the form of nonsense. And from that fact alone, an entire critique of culture can be constructed.