It’s pretty fascinating to me that the internet has such an active fandom for A Series of Unfortunate Events, because I haven’t read those books in a million years, or, more specifically, since 2006, when the last book came out. I used to be obsessed, I tell you, obsessed.
I was nine years old, on vacation with the extended family, when one of my cousins first lent me her copy of The Bad Beginning. I was young enough then that about ninety percent of the snide comedy in it got past me and all I knew was, Oh my gosh, what a brilliant and evil villain! He’s got their sister trapped in a birdcage and he’s going to marry Violet to get her inheritance! And, you know, at the end he vows to hunt them down and “kill” them, which is fightin’ words for a kid’s book, so I was gone. I still remember going to the bookstore in maybe September of that year or October, and my mom gently saying something along the lines of, “You know, there are other books besides Lemony Snicket,” because possibly my determination to get my hands around a copy of The Reptile Room had by that point seeped through her last nerve.
Still, she got into Lemony Snicket pretty quickly after my sister Mary started checking them out of the library and reading them aloud to her, because she picked up on all the comedy we were missing. (She couldn’t get over Olaf dressed up as a woman to kidnap/adopt the orphans in The Miserable Mill: "I’m a poor little receptionist who’s always wanted children of her own. Three children, in fact: a smarty-pants little girl, a hypnotized little boy, and a buck-toothed baby!”)
But the irony is that the death of the comedic overtones that initially got past me also spelled death for the series in general. The last one I one-hundred-percent enjoyed was Book 10 of 13, The Slippery Slope, which was already treading on, well, slippery ground with its lengthy discussions of relativism, not to mention all the kissy-kissy between Violet and Quigley Quagmire (I liked Quigley fine but was too young to be overly invested in shipping; Klaus’s later love interest Fiona I found irritating and unnecessary). There’s a specific part where the kids are about to build a trap for Olaf’s villainous girlfriend Esme Squalor so they can hold her for ransom in order to retrieve Sunny, who’s been kidnapped again, and Klaus gets all wishy-washy and starts quoting Nietzsche’s bit about fighting monsters and looking into the abyss (first time I ever heard it), and all I could think was, "What? She’s been trying to kill you for money! You’re not even planning to hurt her! You’re rescuing your sister, who’s too young to even talk, from a known criminal with zero compunctions!”
Then they end up kidnapping Esme anyway, so the aside does nothing other than make us doubt the goodness of our heroes, which is a weird murky feeling and one you should certainly not inflict on your reader if you aren’t going to follow it up. (In the words of Ray Bradbury: “Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship’s rail.”) Nowadays I might be inclined to appreciate the fact that a kid’s book even touched the subject of morality, but at the time I was more concerned about the fact that they did it wrong.
And from that point, as the preaching got more pronounced and more dreary with each new installment, Count Olaf lost the edge that made him simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. He became merely laughable, but not in a funny way. In the first chapter of The End, for instance (which I maintain ought to have been called The Erroneous Ending), he’s trapped on a small boat with the Baudelaires, a situation that in the first book would have had them out of their minds with terror. Instead, we get a running gag where he keeps asking him to drive them to a repair shop (if I recall correctly) and they just roll their eyes because surely he’s not dumb enough to think that’s even possible? And we’re taken from a potentially deadly and dynamic situation to a couple kids out on a fishing trip with Lame Dad.
The series only worked in the first place because the author wasn’t taking it seriously (or rather, Lemony Snicket, the character, was—Daniel Handler wasn’t), but The End is nothing but chapter after chapter of Snicket taking himself seriously. There are elaborate biblical parallels with a false Messiah who owns a flock of sheep and convinces everyone on the island to simply evacuate after they get infected by a deadly fungus, rather than eat an apple that serves as the antidote. (By the way, who finds this apple? A snake. Ahem.) Then Count Olaf receives a syrupy and dramatic death that he has done nothing to merit, as it had been about three books since the last time he was a genuine threat, as witness boat conversation in Chapter 1.
In short, everything that should have been scary was funny, and everything that should have been funny was scary—and as a result, nothing was funny or scary. Like lowering the contrast on an image: sooner or later you’re left with nothing but blankness.
I was so unsatisfied by The End that I went through that temporary stage of denial where I mentally insisted that it was a great conclusion, but it faded. I think that other people felt the same way, because the buzz of conversation surrounding the series stopped, like a radio switched abruptly off. Or those are my memories, at any rate. Maybe I should read these books again.
