The Headless Bust:

A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium

By Edward Gorey

Harcourt Brace

64pp., $15

Following last year's publication of The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas, Edward Gorey '50 told an interviewer from Newsday, "I wouldn't buy [the book] as a present, but then apparently they're hoping for lots of people to." While the interviewer interpreted this comment as intended "impishly," I could as easily believe that Gorey meant what he said. Until then, the little books that Gorey writes and illustrates had been reliable delights; The Haunted Tea-Cosy stands out as the least interesting of his work. The Headless Bust is the sequel to The Haunted Tea-Cosy, continuing the story of Edmund Gravel and the Bahhumbug and marketed in the same way. Just as Harcourt Brace pushed The Haunted Tea-Cosy as a Christmas present, The Headless Bust has been positioned as a millennium gift-book, a dubious genre to be sure.

Gorey has said, "I was probably fully formed by the time I was 21 or 22." Indeed, his work, beginning with The Unstrung Harp of 1953, has been remarkably consistent: anachronistic, morbid and arcane from the first. Besides illustrating his books, Gorey's drawings grace countless engagement calendars and postcards, the animated opening sequence of PBS's "Mystery!" series, the covers of paperback classics published by Anchor Books in the '50s and '60s, dorm-room posters, and so on. If you do not think you have seen his work, you are probably wrong.

The chronological span of Gorey's work runs from the hornbook-inspired Eclectic Abecedarium through the Jazz Age-naughtiness of The Curious Sofa but will budge no further. An enthusiasm for the obsolete furnishes his rooms with daguerreotypes, gramophones and bell-pulls, and his diction matches the furniture-- his characters say things like "Mercy!" and "Drat!." Gorey's nonsense verse is the direct descendant of Edward Lear's and Lewis Carroll's, and, as it would be impossible to transplant Lear or Carroll to another era, Gorey inherits their Victorian world along with their spirit.