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I discovered Edward Gorey while pursuing a graduate degree at Harvard, where Gorey was an undergraduate some decades before. As a matter of fact, a friend found a shoebox of Gorey juvenilia in a closet in an apartment somewhere in the Cambridge ambit. The papers were obviously for real, but who knew how they wound up there? And who remembers what became of them? (I seem to recall an attempt to unload them at the Gotham Book Mart, the late, lamented shop in Manhattan's Diamond District that was Gorey Central.) Years later, I used to catch glimpses of his towering, reedlike silhouette in the lobby of the New York State Theater, as it then was, during intermission at the New York City Ballet, whose performances he frequented perhaps even more religiously than George Balanchine, the company's founding genius. I mention all this to indicate a certain willingness to get down in the weeds where Gorey's art and biography are concerned. Expected great things of this book, and to be fair, the research is exhaustive. Unfortunately, the author never says once what he can say a hundred times (harping on Gorey's Anglophilia, his eccentric dress code, the rings on his fingers, his camp sensibility, his unwillingness to be labeled gay or not guy). And much of the detail is, quite simply, boring. Clichés abound. Of Gorey's many gifts, two that have failed to rub off on his biographer are economy and concentration. A reader must do a lot of panning for precious little gold.