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The Iron Tonic
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The Iron Tonic: Or, A Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley is a surrealist country-house mystery by Edward Gorey that presents a series of unresolved clues. The work features Gorey's characteristic fine-lined, 19th-century engraving style.
Key Information
The work consists of 14 illustrated panels with accompanying rhyming text written in iambic pentameter. The narrative depicts a remote manor house inhabited by elderly and infirm residents.
The work is dedicated to the memory of Gorey's maternal great-grandmother, Helen St. John Garvey (1834–1907).
Publication
[edit]The Iron Tonic was first published in 1969 by Albondocani Press in a limited edition of 226 copies.[1] It was later republished for the trade market by Harcourt, Inc. in the form of a small, hardbound book illustrated on both front and back covers.
Literary reception
[edit]Wim Tigges described the book as "a compilation of hardly related couplets," in which nonsense objects "are seen to be falling unaccountably out of the sky." Tigges notes it uses a device commonly used in Gorey's writing, "the unexplained recurrence of an irrelevant object".[2]
References
[edit]- ^ Jones, Stephen (2012). The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: Volume 12. Constable & Robinson Ltd. p. 300. ISBN 978-1-78033-712-8.
- ^ Tigges, Wim (1988). An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense. Rodopi. p. 190. ISBN 978-90-5183-019-4.
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