The Gashlycrumb Tinies is an alphabet book written by Edward Gorey first published in 1963 as the first of a collection of short stories called The Vinegar Works, the eleventh work by Gorey.
The book tells the tale of 26 children (each representing a letter of the alphabet) and their untimely deaths. It is one of Edward Gorey's best-known books and is the most notorious amongst his roughly half-dozen mock alphabets.
It has been described as a "sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive". The morbid humor of the book comes in part from the mundane ways in which the children in the story die, such as falling down the stairs or choking on a peach. Far from illustrating the dramatic and fantastical childhood nightmares, these scenarios instead poke fun at the banal paranoias that come as a part of parenting.