There are some adults, Daniel Handler says, who tell him that his funny-scary books for children, written under the name Lemony Snicket, are no longer appropriate — not since the horror and destruction of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
And he acknowledges, “When you see something that terrible happen in the world, your first thought is: Let’s hide ourselves away from this.”
But, then, Handler says, it’s necessary to recognize that the world is a scary place and to come to grips with that fact.
That’s the underlying point of his archly droll “Series of Unfortunate Events” stories that recount the excessively trying trials and the exhausting tribulations of the three Baudelaire orphans at the hands of Count Olaf, a comically sinister actor and distant relative who’s out for their family fortune.
And it’s a perspective that seems to be endorsed by Lemony Snicket’s preteen and teenage fans who, even after the true-life terror of Sept. 11, have continued to purchase his peril-filled books — and, most revealingly, in ever-increasing numbers.
To be sure, the series, which started in 1999 with the publication of “The Bad Beginning” by HarperCollins, was already a publishing juggernaut, surpassing the million-copy mark earlier this year. But sales since then have escalated exponentially — to the point that there are now more than 3.6 million copies in print.
The books are fun to read and well-plotted, says Abby Phillips, a 13-year-old 8th-grader at the Stone Elementary School on the Far North Side. And, given the dangers and threats that the Baudelaires face in each installment in the series (eight so far), she says, “They kind of help you realize how lucky you are and help you cope.”
How lucky?
Well, in the latest Lemony Snicket book, “The Hostile Hospital,” published at the beginning of September, Count Olaf takes over the medical institution of the title and plans to operate on 14-year-old Violet Baudelaire and “accidentally” cut off her head as a means of getting at the family inheritance.
Working amid plot twists
And, then, after a series of plot twists straight out of the Perils of Pauline, Violet’s siblings — 12-year-old Klaus and baby sister Sunny — find themselves in the operating room, masquerading as the two Count Olaf henchmen who are expected to carry out the “operation” on Violet.
“The crowd applauded once more, and Olaf’s associates bowed and blew kisses to each corner of the operating theater as the two children looked at one another in horror,” Lemony Snicket relates in the book.
“`What can we do?’ Klaus murmured to his sister, looking out at the crowd. `We’re surrounded by people who expect us to saw Violet’s head off.'”
Frightening books like those in the Lemony Snicket series were in high demand among middle-school and high school students at the University of Chicago Laboratory School in the days following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
“Right after Sept. 11, we had so many kids come in asking for scary books,” says the school’s librarian, Cynthia Oakes.
“Our best guess was that [a scary book] was a safe place to put their fear.”
The late Bruno Bettelheim, a Holocaust survivor who became world-famous as a child psychologist at the university, saw frightening fairy tales as a way children use to look at their fears at arm’s length, Oakes notes.
“It’s a very scary world out there,” she says. “We need things to help us manage it. [Fear-provoking books] help us work through good and evil.”
That’s been true for the Lemony Snicket books from the beginning, said Handler in a telephone interview from his home in San Francisco.
“There’s something about the books that encourages my readers to contact me about any unfortunate event that’s on their minds,” he said.
“I get a lot of letters when kids are sick.”
He — that is, Lemony Snicket — got hundreds of letters and e-mails following the Sept. 11 attacks from children who were using the books as a way of trying to understand the national trauma.
Children asked if Count Olaf was a terrorist. (He does, after all, bear a bit of a resemblance to the Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.) They wanted to know if the Baudelaire orphans had been near the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks. And, later, after the start of the U.S. air war over Afghanistan, they wanted to know if the unnamed country where the Baudelaires live was at all in danger of being bombed.
In recent weeks, the questions have returned to a more mundane level.
“Now they’re back to complaining about their grumpy teacher or the curfew they have,” Handler says.
Sugarcoating reality
Adults, too often, try to sugarcoat reality for children, Handler complains.
“So many hospital books for young people make it out to be a nice place,” he says.
“But, when you actually go to the hospital, it’s a very scary place.”
Throughout the series, Count Olaf routinely kills off characters who get in his way, but, somehow, at the end of each book, the three orphans are still alive — and usually fleeing.
Yet, the stories, filled with many levels of humor, aren’t as depressing as they might sound.
For adults, there are literary allusions sprinkled throughout the text, usually popping up in the names of peripheral figures in the story.
In the latest book, for example, Klaus and Sunny run into hospital patients called Bernard Rieux (the name of the central character in Albert Camus’ “The Plague”) and Clarissa Dalloway (the title character in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”).
For younger readers, the fun is in “the exaggeration,” says Janice Del Negro, director of the Center for Children’s Books at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s knowing that none of this is real.”
Interruptions
Lemony Snicket’s tone, Handler says, is “mock moralizing.” In narrating the story, Snicket is often pedantic, interrupting the narrative to define a word or phrase, and frequently overwrought.
“He’s 10 times more depressed and horrified and scared than any of his readers,” Handler says.
Indeed, it was that over-the-top emotion that initially attracted Abby Phillips to the Snicket books — for example, the dedication after the title page of the first volume reads: “To Beatrice — darling, dearest, dead.” (Other dedications have continued in the same vein, such as the one for Volume 2: “For Beatrice — My love for you shall live forever. You, however, did not.”)
There’s a cartoonish quality to the dangers and irritations the Baudelaire children must face. For example, when the orphans go to live with Count Olaf in the first book, he puts them in a tiny, filthy bedroom.
And, after describing the room, Snicket notes with an harrumph: “Instead of toys, books, or other things to amuse the youngsters, Count Olaf had provided a small pile of rocks.”
Snicket’s taste for melodrama is so acute that young readers feel superior to him.
“It mocks the condescending and certain voice that children hear from most adults,” says the 31-year-old Handler, who is married but has no children.
“It punctures the all-knowing world of adults.”
Behind Snicket’s buffoonery, though, Handler wants to pass along a lesson that, if trouble can’t be avoided, it can be endured.
“My books teach that one should behave well for its own sake — which includes not being an evil person,” he says. “But it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be the victim of an evil person.”
Scaring up some books for children to read
Three months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., parents are finally starting to get the message that their children want — maybe need — to read scary books, says Kristin Nilsen-Noonan, the children’s department manager at the Anderson’s Bookshop in Elmhurst.
Immediately after the attacks, “they wanted gentleness and happiness and light” in the books their children were reading, she says. “And that’s not what the children wanted.”
Now, she says, moms and dads seem more willing to let frightening books back into the home.
Here, from Nilsen-Noonan, is a list of some of the scary books that children, 8 to 12, have read and enjoyed since Sept. 11:
– “Being Dead: Stories” by Vivian Vande Velde (Harcourt). Seven scary tales, including one in which a girl with a deadly brain tumor is consoled by 18th Century ghosts.
– “Jade Green: A Ghost Story” by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (Aladdin). This ghost story includes mysterious scratchings, an orphan teen and a severed hand.
– “There’s a Dead Person Following My Sister Around” by Vivian Vande Velde (Puffin). The title says it all.
– “A Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor” by Harry Mazer (Simon & Schuster). A 14-year-old boy fishing near the Hawaiian harbor watches the attack on the U.S. fleet, including the ship on which his Navy lieutenant father is stationed.
– “Good Night, Mr. Tom” by Michelle Magorian (HarperCollins). This touching novel includes intense scenes of the bombing of London during World War II.
– “Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier (Laurelleaf). A classic 1974 book about a freshman who challenges the evil ruling powers in his prep school.
And one book for children ages 4-8:
– “Go Away, Big Green Monster!” by Ed Emberly (Little Brown). Reading along, children have the chance to order the comically frightening monster to “go away!”
— Patrick T. Reardon
