Rumpelstiltskin (1973) by Edward Gorey reimagines the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale through the author’s signature lens of gothic absurdity and macabre wit. In this darkly humorous retelling, Gorey preserves the original’s unsettling core—a miller’s daughter forced to spin straw into gold, aided by a sinister, diminutive creature with a penchant for cryptic bargains—while infusing it with his trademark visual and narrative stylings.
The tale unfolds in Gorey’s meticulously crosshatched pen-and-ink illustrations, where the characters, draped in Victorian mourning attire, move through shadowy, claustrophobic interiors. Rumpelstiltskin himself is rendered as a grotesque yet oddly fastidious figure, his exaggerated features and manic energy leaping off the page. Gorey’s sparse, deadpan text heightens the story’s inherent cruelty, undercutting any Disneyfied sweetness with dry asides and abrupt violence (the fate of the boastful miller is particularly Gorey-esque).
Themes of exploitation, desperation, and the perils of unchecked ambition simmer beneath the surface, culminating in the infamous name-guessing scene—here staged with Gorey’s flair for the theatrically grim. True to form, the ending offers no moral redemption, only the quiet horror of a promise kept.
“Gorey doesn’t retell fairy tales—he unearths their buried nightmares.” — The New York Review of Books
