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Run for your lives! It's a Lemony Snicket countdown!
For those of you who haven't yet endured the terrible tales of woe in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, 2004 is a great time to dive into the dark waters of this offbeat and wonderfully original series. With more than 13 million copies sold, Lemony Snicket reigns just beneath Harry Potter as the prince of children's bestsellers. And it's not just kids who appreciate the wry humor and mounting misfortunes in Lemony's books—adults are joining the Snicket fan club, too. To kick off the New Year, we're launching a countdown to the publication of the next Lemony Snicket book in September. Join the excitement as we profile each of the 10 books in the series and keep you up-to-date on news in the realm of the Baudelaire orphans. You'll be ready to share the fun when Book the 11th (The Grim Grotto) is released in the fall.
If you'd like to know more about how this sensational series began, let's start at the beginning, or The Bad Beginning, to be exact. Released in 1999, Book the First broke all the rules of children's publishing. Lemony Snicket, who relays his sad stories through writer Daniel Handler, tells tales that are full of grief, misery and disaster. In the first sentence of book one, Lemony warns readers, "If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book." Sure enough, the three Baudelaire youngsters—Violet, Klaus and Sunny—face a grim situation in the very first chapter. While the children are playing at a nearby beach, the Baudelaire mansion burns and their parents die in the fire, leaving behind a vast fortune. In short order, the children find themselves at the mercy of a distant cousin, the evil and manipulative Count Olaf, who will stop at nothing to get his hands on the children's considerable inheritance. Sent to live in the count's foul and filthy home, the orphans are treated as little more than slaves, forced to prepare and serve dinner to the cruel count and his cohorts in a local theater troupe. When the count cooks up a plan to marry Violet onstage and take control of the Baudelaire bank account, only the sympathetic judge who lives next door stands a chance of thwarting the evil drama. Although the exact time and setting is never revealed, the books have a distinctly Victorian feel. Beautifully etched endpapers, rough-edged pages and quirky illustrations by Brett Helquist all add to the appeal, making these over-the-top melodramas seem like a trip back in time. Handler, a San Francisco native with two adult titles to his credit, describes himself as a fan of Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey, earlier practitioners of dark hilarity. Impressively, Handler never condescends to his young readers. He sprinkles difficult vocabulary words throughout his prose, but never fails to explain and clarify as the story moves along. Each book has 13 chapters and, not surprisingly, the series is supposed to have 13 entries when completed. Handler turned out books at a torrid pace early on, releasing three volumes in 2001, for example. But starting in 2002, he has been writing just one book a year. If he continues at that rate, we can count on a Snicket sendoff in 2006. Oh, woe is us!
Lemony's List
2. The Reptile Room 3. The Wide Window 4. The Miserable Mill 5. The Austere Academy 6. The Ersatz Elevator 7. The Vile Village 8. The Hostile Hospital 9. The Carnivorous Carnival 10. The Slippery Slope 11. Coming September 2004! The Grim Grotto
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Also coming up later this year is Lemony's first appearance on the big screen. The Snicket movie, set for release in December, recently began filming in California with a stellar cast that includes Jim Carrey (as Count Olaf), Meryl Streep and Jude Law. This is one Unfortunate Event you won't want to miss!