The Only Series that Matters

By Francis Bass

Between the ages of six and ten I read a lot of YA and middle grade books, and a lot of book series—but as far as I was concerned, A Series of Unfortunate Events and Harry Potter were the only series that mattered. A decade later, A Series of Unfortunate Events was the series I most cared about rereading, for all its depth, complexity, and creativity. In this series of essays, I examine each book of the series upon rereading them, highlighting literary techniques, thematic explorations, and the ideas communicated in these books that have resonated with me from when I first read the series to today.

The collection also contains The Appalling Appendix, an index of selected notes from my ASOUE notes file.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francis Bass
• Release date: May 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370019700

Francis Bass

Francis Bass is a writer of science fiction and fantasy. His work has appeared in RECKONING, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, and others. He lives in Philadelphia.

Book preview

The Only Series that Matters

Copyright © 2017 by Francis Bass

All rights reserved.

Cover font Flanker Griffo by Studio Di Lena.

Cover photo 13th December 1940: Sheffield blitz courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Bad Beginning

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. The Grim Grotto

12. The Penultimate Peril

13. The End

14. Chapter Fourteen

The Appalling Appendix

Introduction

In January of 2017, I decided to reread the first four books of A Series of Unfortunate Events ahead of the premiere of the first season of the Netflix series. I’d been wanting to reread the books for awhile, and the TV show coming out gave me a perfect reason to do so—and a reason to start posting reviews/essays about the books on my blog. I wasn’t sure if I’d go on to do the same with the rest of the series, but after finishing The Bad Beginning, and enjoying it so much, and having to much to write about it, my mind was made up. This book is a collection of all those blog posts, polished up, with an additional essay discussing my relationship with the whole series, and an appendix full of selected notes. For reference, the page numbers cited in the essays refer to the editions I used—all the US first editions (hardback and paperback, they’re the same.)

So, why this series? Between the ages of six and ten, I read a lot of YA and middle grade books, and a lot of book series—The Underland Chronicles, The Inheritance Cycle, Magic Treehouse, the Alex Rider books, the Alfred Kropp books, Goosebumps, Animorphs, Captain Underpants, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and others—and I don’t have any essay collections about them. It’s because when I was a kid, as far as I was concerned A Series of Unfortunate Events and Harry Potter were the only series that mattered. There were no other books that I reread so often as the books in those series. They were the two pillars of children’s literature for me. Looking back on all the books I read as a kid, those are the only series I’m still interested in rereading—and, although Harry Potter was my favorite when I was a kid, Unfortunate Events was the series I cared about rereading most when I set out to do so in January. The books introduced me to so many concepts, phrases, quotes, and words which have stuck with me to this day—Molotov cocktails, Friedrich Nietzsche, mob psychology, waxing and waning—not to mention the issues they dealt with more profoundly than any other YA books—rejecting incompetent systems, rejecting the advice of adults, self-sufficiency, grief—but I’ll get to all of that in a moment. The point is, the series looms large in my childhood, and hopefully these essays will explain why, and illuminate other matters I find interesting along the way.

1.

The Bad Beginning

The first book is very first-bookish. You can’t tell where the series will end up going from this book—or if you took a guess, you’d get it wrong. However, it does provide us with some high octane Olaf, as the Baudelaires, after being orphaned, go to live with him as their guardian. If Handler didn’t quite have the world pinned down in this book, he did instantly establish the narrative voice, the comic-gothic style, and the entrancingly villainous character of Olaf that would remain consistent throughout the entire series. And all within a hundred and sixty pages—it’s a great opener, and contains one of the best sequences in the whole series, right at …

The Beginning.

Orphans, again. There’re always dead parents in books about kids, or at least one dead parent. Just from the series I listed in the introduction, this trope is present in The Underland Chronicles, The Inheritance Cycle, the Alex Rider books, the Alfred Kropp books, Animorphs (to some extent), The Spiderwick Chronicles, and, of course, Harry Potter. And why not mention A Wrinkle in Time and Oliver Twist while we’re at it?

So yeah, orphans again. The series is about three orphans being moved from guardian to guardian, always pursued by Count Olaf, who schemes to steal their inheritance. Why is it that A Series of Unfortunate Events has such a claim to being depressing and sad and dark, and all these other books with dead parents don’t? Because of the way the trope is handled, and presented.

Unlike every other book I just mentioned, in The Bad Beginning, we actually see the scene in which the children are told that their parents are dead, and their house has been consumed in a fire. We see Mr. Poe, the executor of their parents’ estate, fumbling with small talk before he tells them what has happened. We see Violet wonder if he’s making a joke. We see them grieving for their parents, and for the utter destruction of their previous lives. It isn’t glossed over in a paragraph of summary. It isn’t something that happened when they were just toddlers. It’s right there in the opening chapter of the book, and it’s treated with psychological realism. It’s bleak, uncomfortable, and gritty. The scene is iconic Unfortunate Events to me.

Sunny Liked to Bite Things.

Unfortunately, the subtle touches of this scene aren’t frequent throughout the book. It’s not that the main characters, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, are unrealistic—it’s just that the book moves so quickly, there’s so little time between investigating and outsmarting and escaping for them to just be regular people. They come off like video game characters, defined solely by their special skill. This issue improves in later books, but it is glaring in this one.

Even so, their special skills are interesting because of how lopsided they are. Violet’s specialty is inventing things, Klaus’s is his wide range of knowledge from all the books he’s read, and Sunny’s (the baby) is biting things with her sharp teeth. Normally, in fiction for children or for adults, the focus would be on physical ability, and intellectual ability would be relegated to a single side character. With the Baudelaires, it’s the opposite. Sunny is the one with the physical ability, and she is, both because of her age and the fact that’s she’s just one out of three, marginalized. Intellectual ability is the main method for action in these books, represented in two different aspects. Violet embodies problem solving and creating thinking, while Klaus embodies the acquisition and application of knowledge. I think the fact that these two abilities are shown as different, separate skills, and not just lumped into one character who is The Smart One, is part of what sets these books apart.

Where Are We?

If you actually try to figure out the time and place in which these books occur, you’ll have a fit. It seems like England, particularly London, from the fact that the main antagonist is a Count, there is mention of Royal Gardens (18), and a reference to the London branch of the Herpetological Society in the letter to the editor at the end of the book. Determining the time is trickier. On one hand, there is the use of the word automobile, and the appearance of horse-drawn carriages on cobblestone streets (18). It seems like turn-of-the-century London, yet there are anachronisms, like a court case involving illegal use of someone’s credit card (35) and Violet’s wistful desire for an inventing studio with an elaborate computer system. (59) So where are we? When are we?

Nowhere. The books are fantasy. They’re set in a world that is some combination of Dickens and the Believe it or Not panel. Although all of the events of the first