The Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy & Other Stories

In a slim collection of drawings and verse stories that owes much to the cross-hatched, macabre world of Edward Gorey, the visually ingenious filmmaker Tim Burton (Batman; Edward Scissorhands) tries his hand in The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories at a quieter, more delicate medium. Quirky pen-and-ink drawings accompany a minimalist text, stories that are a distillation of Burton's characteristic mixture of the touching and the bizarre. In "Voodoo Girl," one of Burton's odd creatures "knows she has a curse on her, a curse she cannot win./ For if someone gets/ too close to her,/ the pins stick further in."