The Gashlycrumb Tinies
The Gashlycrumb Tinies is one of Edward Gorey's most debated works, audience-wise. While originally marketed to adults, this text is made so similarly to other children's fiction that one has to wonder if Gorey agreed with the marketing. The book's childishness is not only in the small size (18 x 19 cm) or alphabet format of the book, but exists in the messages that he sends to his readers in his illustrations and text.
Unlike The Wuggly Ump and The Dwindling Party, The Gashlycrumb Tinies is printed in black and white. The world is drained of color by comparison to the more childish stories, and in the color's place is dark cross-hatching and blank white space. As a result, the shadows are heavier, and the children are surrounded by empty space, small and alone in their deaths.
Gorey's frank depictions of death are often snapshots of the seconds leading up to the deaths. Despite the suffering they are about to go through, the children's faces are more often than not blank or even serene before their death. Gorey's illustrations emphasize the reality of death in a way that even children understand. Similarly, all of the children in the book die from means that real children also have risk of dying from, which may prove to be a lesson for any child readers on basic safety.
With his almost grotesque illustrations and his purposeful use of the picture book medium, Gorey was almost definitely playing against the trend of bibliotherapy, or explaining how to deal with death in books. The stark portrayal of the realities of death are a far cry from the sanitized death stories of the 1960s, and go directly against the bibliotherapy tradition, which is much softer and more about instructing a child how to feel about the vaguely-depicted death of a loved one (most often a pet).
The emphasis of The Gashlycrumb Tinies is on the children, but that's not to say that there are no adults in the pages. Granted, the only adult we ever actually see is Death on the cover, but there are implications of adults on at least four of the pages. All of these adults are the direct cause of death for the child who happens to be on the page. This message seems to be aimed more at children than adults.
It's not only malevolent strangers, such as the "thug" on one page that is implied to strangle a child or the maker of the bomb that blows a child to bits, or accidental deaths, such as the girl trampled in a bar brawl, but the close relatives of these children. The child "thrown out of a sleigh" doesn't appear to have lost his balance, and the wording implies that he was literally tossed. It's very likely that the child has been literally thrown out of the sled by his adult caretakers.
If Gorey is just looking to be macabre in an adult fashion, it's unlikely that he'd paint adults as untrustworthy villains at worst and murderously careless at best. It's even more unlikely that he'd ever come close to the topic of child abuse or neglect. Gorey, while blunt and somewhat grotesque, is unfailingly honest about the dangers that children face in their every-day lives, both in- and ouside the home.