Fantod Pack

Edward Gorey made the Fantod Pack, and that sentence is the review: twenty black and white cards in the master's crosshatched gothic-absurdist line, with titles like The Limb and The Waltzing Mouse, first published in Esquire in the sixties as a perfect parody of tarot that works disturbingly well as one. Pomegranate's edition keeps it in print for the world's Gorey shelves. The joke's depth is the point: Gorey's omens, ambiguous, ominous, ridiculous, mimic divination's actual texture so precisely that drawing them produces real readings, dread and delight in exact Gorey proportion. The interpretive booklet's mock-solemn fortunes are among his finest small works. It suits Gorey devotees absolutely, collectors of literary and artist's oracles, readers with gallows humor, and anyone who suspects the line between omen and absurdity was always thinner than the mystics admit. The earnest should be warned: the deck will tease them, elegantly, and mean every word of it.