This Halloween , Gorey fans will pay tribute to the man who stored a mummy’s head in the closet of his Manhattan apartment and counted as his most intimate life partner a herd of cats: dressing up as his characters, performing his work or just engaging in acts of Goreyesque weirdness .

What would Mr. Gorey make of his status as an All Hallows’ Eve grand ghoul were he alive to see it?

“That would have given Gorey himself the fantods,” said Mark Dery, using one of the antiquated words the artist loved to collect and trot out in his books. (It means a state of uneasiness.) “Gorey shrank from the obvious. Gorey is deep.”

Image The cover of “Born to Be Posthumous,” by Mark Dery. Credit... Hachette Book Group

A cultural critic and author, Mr. Dery has written a new biography, “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey” (Little, Brown). He spent seven years on the project, time he needed to wrap his head around “the panoramic sweep” of his subject’s mind.

For Mr. Dery, and for anyone else, plunging into Goreyland means becoming acquainted with Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes ,” with French silent films, the surrealist collage novels of Max Ernst, Victorian children’s literature, the ancient Japanese novel “The Tale of Genji” and so forth. It means looking through a pre-Stonewall lens, when many gay men and women led closeted lives and their sexuality didn’t necessarily figure in their expressed personal politics.