As we wander off with Edward Gorey into the next millennium our reasons for being here are far from clear. Nevertheless, the master craftsmen is at his best . . Ere the last guest was fin'lly gone.Ça va, hélas, from bad to worse: Adieu to prose, alló to verse. The Bahhumbug with lack of tact. Now called attention to the fact, Which made it feel to Edmund Gravel. He was already to unravel With The Headless Bust , Edmund Gravel and the Bahum Bug from Gorey's "Dispirited and Distasteful" Christmas tale, The Haunted Tea-Cosy , have returned to usher in the New Year. The story, told in verse, takes up just after Edmund's riotous party. He and the Bug are whisked off to a faraway village for another round of strange and vaguely eerie encounters. Fans of Gorey's distinctive ink drawings, tending toward the well-dressed and slightly mad, will not be disappointed--they make for an engrossing book with or without the accompanying deliciously odd text. ("Reversing at a tango tea/ In Snogg's Casino-not-on-Sea/ L-- tripped and cried, 'I am afraid/ They tampered with the marmalade.'") There is also plenty to be had for aficionados of the mysterious little rituals, mentioned nonchalantly, that seem so logical to the inhabitants of Gorey's bizarre world--the Bandage Folder's Ball being a head-cocking highlight. The Headless Bust is perfect for a winter's read by the fireplace, just before drifting off into fruitcake-induced dreams. --Ali Davis Characters from The Haunted Tea Cosy return for more of Gorey's inimitably spooky doings. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Gorey's poems-with-pictures depict a leisurely but anxious upper-class world whose technology and domestic, sartorial, and tonsorial styles are those of the Edwardian era. That time, the years between Oscar Wilde and the Great War, when Victoria's dissolute son occupied Britain's throne, was one of crack-up. The Victorian world was about to shatter, and an aura of impending collapse seems, at least from a later-twentieth-century perspective, to have pervaded the period. Precisely that aura infests Gorey's fey--that is, doomed, daft, and forbidding as well as campy--little books, which are dizzy as well as dire, silly as well as sullen. Here Gorey brings back Edmund Gravel and the Bahhumbug from his "Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas," The Haunted Tea-Cosy , to feature in a "Melancholy Meditation" for the forthcoming, momentous (or not), millennial New Year's Day. "Hours and hours after dawn," the last guest has been ejected, but things are only going "from bad to worse." One of Gorey's typically oversized insects flits in and wafts Gravel and bug to "some remote provincial town," where they witness several ominous, or at least odd, occurrences--visions of things to come? "Why should we care?" says the Bahhumbug. "It's quelque chose d'un grand mystere ." But the last page leaves the pair quizzically contemplating millennium's end, anyway. Delicious. Ray Olson A hilariously suave (previously unpublished) morality tale from the master of understated mayhem and apocalypse (The Unstrung Harp, p. 572, etc.). Its wonderfully dark pictures and text detail a dream journey undertaken, at century's end, by dull-looking Edmund Gravel and an accompanying arachnoid figure, the Bahhumbug, to a ``remote provincial town'' where polite society's veneer is blithely whisked away and assorted beautiful people are revealed in all their mendacity, folly, and awful bad luck. As always, Gorey's trademark rhyming couplets are filled with inexplicably funny, sad, and somehow beautiful occurrences (e.g., ``Sir U___ fell from a speeding train,/Which did some damage to his brain,/And after that he did not know /How to pronounce the letter O''). Calling this delightful tale its author's ``Vision of Judgment'' or Inferno would be like breaking a butterfly on a wheelwith which image, come to think of it, Gorey might do something ineffably sinister and entertaining. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Edward Gorey (1925-2000) wrote and illustrated such popular books as The Doubtful Guest, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and The Headless Bust. He was also a very successful set and costume designer, earning a Tony Award for his Broadway production of Edward Gorey's Dracula. Animated sequences of his work have introduced the PBS series Mystery! since 1980.