Book Alert: Gorey's Halloween, Ghosts, and Saint Melissa

You read it first at Goreyana earlier this year...new books by Edward Gorey.

On September 4, Bloomsbury released Halloween Treat/Edward Gorey's Ghosts. It’s a flip book: read one direction, “kids and cats go trick or treating and gather loot that might be tricks--or perhaps the best treat imaginable: their very own monsters”; flip it around and read it the other way and “you'll delve into a collection of Gorey's ghosts, curated from his extensive oeuvre.”

We’re pleased to note the rear cover of this book (essentially the front cover of Edward Gorey’s Ghosts) is the artwork taken from 1983’s The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt – specifically of Johnny Dixon lingering below an open window and watching a shapeless mass fly out the window. (All these years later we still feel sorry for Chad.  Sort of.)

On October 30, Bloomsbury will release another Gorey tale, Saint Melissa the Mottled. No word on where she ranks alongside other great saints such as Fidgeta and Floradora but Melissa sounds like another blessed one:

Saint Melissa was canonized not for her performance of healing miracles and martyrdom, but despite (or because of?) her Miracles of Destruction—rough-and-tumble hijinks and dabbles in the supernatural. Instead of the skills proper young ladies studied, Saint Melissa was adept at the bringing on of migraines, the refinement of lust, and the involutions of penmanship and calligrams. And as Gorey wrote, "letters she wrote are still to be delivered, traps she set are still to be sprung, pronouncements she devised are still to be promulgated, objects she hid are still to be found."