The West Wing Hardcover – 2 Nov. 2009

Beautiful book design!

Not sure what I was expecting tbh. The book is basically just a series of uncaptioned pictures - an empty room, a view of a half open door etc. It's up to the reader to interpret what they want from these. You might be drawn back time and time again by the mystery of it all or, like me, you might flick through it once, go "huh, well that's a thing" and then never read it again. YMMV.

The West Wing is a wordless book, each page featuring one of Gorey's meticulously drawn images, all of which have an ambiguity about them that is sometimes sinister, sometimes strangely sad - but with no text you are not quite sure why... I'm a big Gorey fan and bought this while researching a project for university based on ambiguity and the uncanny, and found it useful for that, but also just a beautiful collection of illustrations to flick through.

Inasmuch as anything about Gorey is typical, this is. Meticulously executed line drawings, the blackest sense of humour, the sharpest sense of tragedy, and a story spiralling deliriously (deliciously!) out of control. Not, perhaps, a piece for the Gorey novice, but a must for the shelf of an aficionada.

Thirty strange b/w drawings of room interiors, each requiring you to look and use your imagination to see what (might) be going on: a shadow on a wall of an apparently levitating woman; a ghostly face peering through a window and a letter on the floor; two (handkerchiefs?) flying; a candle apparently flying through the air... The more I looked at this, the more I liked it.

In the west wing Gorey tells 30 individual stories through 30 captivating illustrations. With each frame comes the question, why?Why is this man lying on the floor?Why are there only 3 shoes scattered on the floor? Why is that rock on the table and so on, so forth.I spent an age studying each illustration looking for clues that would give an answer. Alas Gorey is the master of mystery. It is up to the imagination to decide the outcome.The West Wing wasn't one of my favourites but again the mysterious illustrations make it worth a view.[...]