More of Brer Rabbit’s Tricks by Edward Gorey is a wickedly sly and visually arresting take on the classic African-American folktales of Brer Rabbit, originally popularized by Joel Chandler Harris in the Uncle Remus stories. Gorey, with his signature gothic sensibility and dry wit, reinterprets the trickster’s escapades through a series of stark, monochromatic illustrations that amplify the tales’ inherent cunning and dark humor.
The book distills Brer Rabbit’s mischievous spirit into a sequence of near-wordless vignettes, where Gorey’s meticulous crosshatching and exaggerated character designs—Brer Fox’s lanky menace, Brer Bear’s lumbering bulk, and Brer Rabbit’s wiry guile—bring the Southern folklore into his own eerie universe. The stories retain their original tension between survival and cruelty, but Gorey’s detached, almost clinical presentation heightens the absurdity of the violence (tar babies, briar patches, and flung frying pans all make appearances).
Unlike Harris’s dialect-heavy narratives, Gorey relies on visual storytelling, reducing the tales to their essential, brutal comedy: a battle of wits where the small and clever triumph through sheer audacity. The result feels like a cryptic folkloric scroll, unearthed from some alternate, shadow-drenched version of the American South.
“Gorey’s Brer Rabbit doesn’t outsmart his enemies—he out-weirds them.” — The Comics Journal
