The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas [Hardcover]

Edward Gorey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 1998

Gorey has never been funnier or more “impossible to resist” (Boston Herald) than in this peculiar retelling of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Edward Gorey's first book in 25 years, The Haunted Tea-Cosy is a classic work from that magnificently morbid master. The plot of this "dispirited and distasteful diversion for Christmas" revolves around one Edmund Gravel, an Edwardian Scrooge whose attempt to slice a stale fruitcake unleashes an assortment of guilt-inducing ghosts. There's the Spectre of Christmas That Never Was, who directs our hero's attention to a cowering orphan in a graveyard (along with some other, lower-key bits of pathos: "In the high street of the village Reverend Flannel lost his tuning-fork.") The Spectre of Christmas That Isn't also chips in with a kidnapping, a domestic dispute, and a return to the aforementioned graveyard: "To the south, in the cemetery a wrong coffin in a newly dug grave was found to contain rolls of used wallpaper." Like the Dickensian miser upon whom he's based, Gravel is transformed by this ghoulish guided tour. He renounces his life of solitude and invites all of Lower Spigot to a party, featuring "a cake taller than anything else in the room, a conflation of Chartres Cathedral and the Stupa at Borobudur iced in dazzling white sugar" (not pictured, alas). Gorey's illustrations for The Haunted Tea-Cosy are looser and less elaborately cross-hatched than some of his earlier creations. But like the text, these oddly stilted and very Anglophiliac scenes remain a model of delicious, deadpan hilarity. --James Marcus

From Library Journal

In his first new book in 25 years, Gorey rethinks Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 64 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company (October 31, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151004153
• ISBN-13: 978-0151004157
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 7.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #222,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > Arts & Photography > Drawing > Pen & Ink

More About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amusing diversion for Christmas, November 5, 2002

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas (Hardcover)

Three ghosts, a recluse and an initial apparition. Dickens, right? Wrong: Edward Gorey does his own take on "Christmas Carol" in "The Haunted Tea Cosy." Delightfully verbose and filled with Gorey's surreal drawings, this is a picture book that adults will adore.

Recluse Edward Gravel is going about dreary tasks before Christmas. Then sudden an enormous insectile creature leaps from beneath the tea cosy. (Never mind what a tea cosy is) It is the Bahhum Bug, which has come to "diffuse the interests of didacticism." To escort the Bahhum Bug and Mr. Gravel, three subfuse but transparent personages appear to show him the Christmas That Never Was, The Christmas That Isn't, and The Christmas That Never Will Be. They show him distressing scenes around the grey town of Lower Spigot. It's written in a wry, twisted style, this book includes delightfully dour illustrations by the late and much lamented Gorey.

Tired of relentless holiday cheer? Looking for a dash of Halloween's darkness in the chirrupy holiday season? Then check out "The Haunted Tea Cosy," and then carry on to "the very edge of the unseemly"!

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A slight poem, February 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas (Hardcover)

I've read this book a time or two and looked up words I thought I knew. They're sometimes long, sometimes arcane and even sometimes quite inane.

Didactically its well diffused. It's only we it leaves confused. Just when you think you've got the plot, you find what's plot is really not.

And here's a clue that's truly droll. Wallpaper seems to have a role. Perhaps it's meant to be the paste that makes diffusiveness a whole.

Yet it's a Dickens of a story, and we know, of course, it's a-la-Gorey.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bahum Bug and Happy New Year, December 5, 1999

By 

Ann W. Unemori (Savannah, GA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas (Hardcover)

This book is a wonderfl antithesis to all the forced jollities of Dicken's beloved chestnut. Old Scrooge should only meet this Bahum Bug! Instead, the Yuletide Bug takes the dour Edward Gravel through a tour of Christmases that Never Were, Isn't, and Never Will Be, all shown in wonderfully ambiguous terms. Of course the Moral Lesson Is Learned, and Mr.Gravel learns to sheer cheer with the equally grey people of his town of Lower Spigot. But the delight is that nowhere does Gorey force the lesson on us, never do the odd little tragedies, even in cemetaries, force one to See the Real Meaning of Christmas--until we have finished the story, and even then it is a droll little moral. This is one story I intend to make a holiday standard in my family.