I’m going to jump right in and blaspheme: I was never crazy about The Cat in the Hat. I owned The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, but I always liked the other Dr. Seuss books I had better.

There was something about The Cat in the Hat that was extremely unsettling to me. I couldn’t put it into words as a kid, but when I think about it now, I realize that there is something really demonic about that Cat in the way he insinuates himself into the lives of the two children and somehow manages to thwart all desperate protest and throw the house into turmoil and destruction. The inevitability of the Cat-made disaster looms over the story right from the first few pages.

The pink ink, the terrorized goldfish, the two Things - everything in the book spins out of control and descends into completely surreal madness, and the children’s anxiety and panic during the race against time to organize the world again before their mother gets home makes the whole thing really nightmarish.

But then, general surreal madness really appeals to me, and that is why I can say without hesitation that I adore Dr. Seuss.

His books shaped my childhood. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t own Dr. Seuss books or when I didn’t force my family members to read Fox in Socks to me until they were laughing so hard that they couldn’t speak (which is what happened to me last night as I attempted to read the “beetle battle” passages out loud).

Dr. Seuss’s world is filled with nooks and crannies, round windows and crooked doorways and sheltered ledges where you can curl up and get cozy. The Sleep Book is my absolute favorite. It’s particularly full of those nooks and crannies, and whenever it was read to me, I would look at each page and try to decide where I would want to sleep if I was in the Stiltwalkers’ Hall or at Herk-Heimer Falls.

For the same reason, Oh the Thinks You Can Think is my other favorite Dr. Seuss book. I love the “architectuality" of it. As a kid, I was intrigued and entranced by those impossible, Escher-like stairways and floating swimming pools. It was amazingly easy for me enter that world, to fall into each page and walk into every jumbled building or look out each window onto alien plains with alien creatures.

The vaguely disturbing undertones of some of Dr. Seuss’ art are expressed much more explicitly in the wonderful paintings in the book The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss. The gloomier colors, the murkier atmosphere - it’s the Dr. Seuss for adults, the Dr. Seuss that I somehow always knew “lurked" behind that plate of green eggs and ham.

I feel sorry for all my friends who never had Dr. Seuss books growing up. It’s one of those things like Star Wars: you either experienced it or you didn’t, either it’s a part of you or it’s not. I don’t know if you can work backwards and manage to capture the true beauty of Dr. Seuss if you didn’t encounter him as a child. “Would you eat them in a house? Would you eat them with a mouse?” just sounds like a silly kid’s rhyme - but to me, it calls up this atmosphere of magic and mystery that’s both unsettling and amazing.

It makes me remember exactly what it felt like to be a kid.

I don’t know if everyone would agree with me lumping Edward Gorey and Dr. Seuss into one big category. On the one hand, the two writers/illustrators probably couldn’t be more different. Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, really liked children and his books really are for children - even The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss wouldn’t scare a kid.

From the little I know of Edward Gorey, however, he doesn’t particularly like babies or children, and though he ostensibly writes “children’s books”, they’re not really for children at all (as morbid as I may have been as a child, I don’t think even I would have wanted the Gashlycrumb Tinies on my wall).

On the other hand, I see Edward Gorey as a kind of macabre, misanthropic Dr. Seuss for grown-ups. And because Edward Gorey’s books make me laugh as much now as Dr. Seuss books did 20 years ago, I feel that the two can sit together here in one section and not cause too much trouble.

I didn’t discover Edward Gorey until I was in college, when I came across a poster of the Gashlycrumb Tinies, which I immediately snapped up and gleefully tacked to the door of my dorm room (kind of an “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” gesture). I was then given the Amphigorey books as a present, and I soon became a full-fledged fan of Gorey’s ominous Edwardian world.

I find Edward Gorey’s work, like Dr. Seuss’s, very architectural, and that appeals to me. The interiors he creates are stiflingly dark and curtained and paneled. Just looking at them makes me feel claustrophobic. The outside world is flat, grey and windswept, somehow devoid of life.

When I look at his art, I get the impression that the world he creates exists in a vacuum. His manor houses are the airless, menacing, well-carpeted sorts of places where the sound of a footstep on a stair would be muffled, sucked up by the heavy tapestries and looming furniture, so that you could never be sure if you had actually heard a footstep at all. And outside of his houses, in his moor-like landscapes, a cry for help would be carried away on the wind before anyone had the chance to hear it.

It’s all mighty sinister. And yet - hilarious.

I can, of course, understand why some people would think Edward Gorey’s work is just sick, and not funny at all (probably the same type of people who are appalled at books like 101 Uses for a Dead Cat - which, incidentally, I also found cruelly amusing many years ago). It does take a certain pitch-black sense of humor to find exploding babies and extinguished children hilarious.

Perhaps it’s funny because it’s all so stylized and staged. There’s a distinct artistic distance to Gorey’s work which I think is what allows one to laugh as his characters perish in fits or are plagued by doubtful guests. I, too, find his books pretty twisted, but they’re tastefully, amusingly twisted. If you have a taste for the melancholy, melodramatic, morbid, and macabre, you will love this man’s work as much as I do.