John Bellairs was an author of young adult books with spooky settings and (Edward) Gorey covers.

A Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Bellairs graduated Magna cum Laude and moved to Chicago whereupon he shortly earned a Masters in English from The University of Chicago. In 1963 John began a career of teaching, first in Winona, Minnesota at the College of Saint Teresa as an instructor of English. By 1966 his first book, St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies, was released and he was teaching in Mount Carroll, Illinois as a member of the Humanities faculty at Shimer College. There for only one year, he moved overseas to live and write in Bristol, England for six months. He relocated to Massachusetts upon his return in 1968 with a second book, The Pedant and the Shuffly, soon released. He married Priscilla Braids on June 24 and began teaching English at Emmanuel College in Boston. A third book, The Face in the Frost, was published the following year. After a two-year teaching post at Merrimack College in North Andover, Bellairs’ years of writing and rewriting paid off in 1973 with his young-adult masterpiece, The House With a Clock in its Walls, a supernatural thriller staring the portly Lewis Barnavelt, Uncle Jonathan Barnavelt, and their neighbor Florence Zimmermann. – Bellairsia

Anthony and his friends generally overcome evil forces bent on ending the world. In this series the adult mentor is a very wise and worldly small town librarian named Mrs. Ells. – Good old Wikipedia

I particularly like the cover above because the girl in the glasses looks like me! Thank you Mr Gorey 🙂

The art for the cover of the book (below) is wonderfully spooky, but this is one of the disjointed paintings created for the series. The front and back cover of the dust jacket do not read as a continuous image when viewed as a single image. – Goreyana

Edward Gorey was always the master at depicting the light from a torch in an eerie setting!