This October 31st, after you've wiped your face clean of caked-on costume make-up, put your smelly thrift store costume into a tightly tied plastic bag, and checked your kid's candy for razor blades, if you're not too exhausted for some bedtime reading, crack open a copy of Alexander Theroux's The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Gorey’s darkly comic tales about violence, cruelty, and the lonely world of solitary children take place in a shadowy, gothic universe perfectly suited for Halloween musings.

A certain set might know Gorey best as the illustrator whose drawings are featured in the classic animated introduction to the PBS Mystery! series, but Theroux is most interested in Gorey as the author and illustrator of “menacing little books, written as if by moonlight.” Theroux's book is a brief, anecdotal story of Gorey's life, tightly packed with analysis of his work, a healthy dose of examples of his drawings, and brimming with little stories and observations about Gorey's behavior.

Theroux was a friend of Gorey's and a visitor to his Cape Cod home. So while he can tell us that Gorey was an only child, and draw connections between his upbringing and his work like a normal biographer, he can also directly recall things like this: “Gorey pulsating with delight over the silent film The Single Standard (1929), starring Greta Garbo, Nils Asther, and Johnny Mack Brown, when he would begin listing all the shapes -- points, lines, curves, planes -- of Twenties furniture, clothes, hats, shoes, which he likened to variegation in the frozen leaves.”

Theroux's affectionate portrait of his friend gives us a full picture of his eccentricities and varied tastes. He spends a paragraph on exhausting the “astonishing extremes” of Gorey's character. On one end of the pendulous personality swing, Gorey is a voracious reader of serious literature. On another, he’s addicted to daytime soaps. Theroux also pays close attention to the idiosyncrasies of Gorey's speech, which he peppered with phrases like spiffy, icky, zippy, bunty, and zingy, while simultaneously “sprinkling his sentences with French phrases.” Theroux attributes the affected French to either Henry James or Holly Golightly. The cartoony parlance is left unexplained.

Theroux's acquaintance with his subject gives his moments of high praise a kind of tenderness, and earns him the right to speak freely (not that much seems to stand in the way of Theroux speaking freely). “He did not crank out shlock with big red hands, nothing like it,” Theroux says of his prolific friend. “He was a diamond engraver.”