The writer-artist Edward Gorey is probably a special favorite of plenty of movie freaks who sometimes have to turn away from the screen and let their heads cool off with a book. A legendarily omnivorous cultural consumer, Gorey himself poured into his work images inspired by his intake of silent movie serials, Gothic art design, early horror films and and stylish B pictures such as Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon. The awesome Ed Park (author of the awesome novel Personal Days, writes in the awesome Moving Image Source: "Gorey also claimed to have exhausted the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art. There he immersed himself in the multipart crime epics of Louis Feuillade (not just the famous Fantômas and Les Vampires but the all-but-unseeable Tih Minh and Barrabas, “the greatest movie ever made”) and encountered one of his 'great influences,' 'a film that no one ever put together': 'The Museum of Modern Art just had all the footage of it. It was Italian, it was a serial, it was called Grey Rats. But it was completely out of context. You’d be watching and say, “Oh yes, that happened half-an-hour ago.” Somebody had thrown it all together in a big box, on reels, and we watched it that way, it took about two weeks.'" Park adds, "This is the dream life: obsessive eyeball mileage, movies as long as a night’s sleep, scenes shuffled out of order, cause following effect, sustained silences in which mouths move and every title card seems to crystallize the swarming drama into koans."

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