Oh, Sweet Misery!
Sally Lodge -- 5/29/00
Tales of ultimately unfortunate kids find an eager audience
Those who gravitate toward children's books with warm and fuzzy endings should steer clear--far clear--of a series of children's tales about three ill-fated orphans whose encounter with something fuzzy is far more likely to be with a large, man-eating arachnid than a happy outcome. Yet the--alas--too aptly titled A Series of Unfortunate Events, penned by one Lemony Snicket and illustrated by Brett Helquist, has had some fortunate results in bookstores. HarperCollins Children's Books reports an in-print total of 125,000 copies of the series' initial four installments, the first of which, The Bad Beginning, has returned to press five times since its fall 1999 release. The Miserable Mill, the latest tale of the orphaned Baudelaire siblings' w , is already in its second printing since publication in April.
Indeed, "miserable" is the operative word here. In the opening lines of The Bad Beginning, the pseudonymous Snicket warns readers, "If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book," and g s on to promise that there is also nothing happy about the beginning and middle of the tale he tells. The author is true to his word. Within pages, the smiles are washed permanently from the faces of the three once-cheerful Baudelaire children: their parents are killed in a fire that destroys the family's mansion and the trio is sent to live in the rickety, filthy house of a distant relative, the vile Count Olaf. Here they are forced to sleep in a room with a single lumpy bed and a cardboard box for a closet, wear relentlessly itchy clothing, eat cold, gray oatmeal and perform endless chores. And their adversities accumulate from there.
The seeds of these innocents' misery were sown one evening over drinks, reported Susan Rich, editor at HarperTrophy, who is a friend of Lemony Snicket's alter ego, Daniel Handler. "I greatly admired his writing for adults and decided to try to lure him over to our side--the children's side," she said. "I knew we shared a similar sensibility about children's books, which I'd define as a resistance to fall into the overly trodden paths of traditional stories, and a resistance to anything that is too sweet or patronizing or moralistic. One evening, when we met for drinks, I suggested to Daniel that he write a middle-grade series and he mentioned an idea that had been simmering in his mind. And so our discussion turned to the Baudelaire orphans."
Handler, who has written two adult novels for St. Martin's (The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth), notes that at that time he did have a third book in the works. But the prospect of creating what he calls "a book that I would have liked to read when I was a kid" led the author to sign on with Harper. "Never in a million years would I have envisioned writing this kind of book," he reflected. "Though I always wanted to be a dark, mysterious person, instead I was always a bright and obvious person. But I have always preferred stories in which mysterious and creepy things happen. As a kid, I hated books where everyone joined the softball team and had a grand time or found true love on a picnic. I liked stories set in an eerie castle that was invaded by a snake that strangled the residents. I was a big fan of Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey. In fact, Gorey's The Blue Aspic was the first book I bought with my own money."
A Series of Quite Fortunate Events
Though Rich and Handler were excited by the anticipation of the Baudelaires' multiple misfortunes, they were a bit apprehensive about the reactions of others. "We were fearful that maybe the whiskey sours and our friendship had something to do with our enthusiasm," Rich admitted. But their worries were unfounded. Instead, she explained, "this series has received a groundswell of support each step of the way--first in-house, then from the independents and chain bookstores and finally from young readers themselves, as well as parents, librarians and teachers. Every now and then we encounter someone who just d sn't get it--that absolutely nothing good happens to these three charming children--but that has occurred very rarely."
Certainly very rarely on the road, where Handler has spent quite a bit of time promoting the series and winning converts to his bleak chronicles. The manner in which he visits schools and bookstores is as unorthodox as his tales--and fittingly cryptic. Rather than appear as Lemony Snicket (a moniker that popped into his head one day when, while researching an earlier book, he phoned a radical right-wing political organization and the member who answered asked him his name for the group's mailing list), Handler shows up at events and announces that he is Snicket's "representative." Wearing a black cape, he carries an embosser to "sign" books in the author's stead, as well as an accordion that he plays while singing a w ful ballad about the doomed orphans. "I also bring with me a gruesome bug under glass," said Handler, "and I tell the kids that the bug stung Mr. Snicket under the armpit, which is why he can't be there. And I tell them this should teach them a lesson: never raise your hand."
By booksellers' reports, kids and adults love Handler's schtick, which entails dropping clues as to his identity by intentionally slipping up so that the kids become convinced that he is Snicket after all--though he refuses to concede the fact. "He is outrageous and funny and by the end of his performance, kids are in a total frenzy," remarked Debbie Pettid of Reading Reptile in Kansas City, who hosted Handler last fall. "Though the children are frantically trying to get him to admit he is Mr. Snicket, the author has an amazing natural ability at crowd control. The kids never go over the top."
Pettid and her co-owner husband, Pete Cowden, went all out for Handler's visit, at which two of their own children and a young friend dressed up as the Baudelaire orphans and hid amongst the young guests as a bellowing Count Olaf look-alike stormed into the store in pursuit of them. Their store has sold close to 2,000 copies of Handler's books, which Pettid calls "a huge number for us to sell of a series." The books' unusually low price--$8.95 for a handsome hardcover designed to resemble a Victorian tome--has clearly driven sales of the series, commented Pettid, whose customers often buy multiple books in the series at one time. "The publisher made a very smart move with this cover price," she said. "It makes the books accessible to kids, many of whom I see spending their own money on them."
Word-of-mouth and handselling have also been key to the books' success, retailers agree. Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books (which has stores in Miami Beach and Coral Gables, Fla.), credits his 10-year-old daughter's aggressive "handselling" for much of the Baudelaire buzz in his shop. "She single-handedly sold this series to her entire fourth-grade class and we really saw the results," he commented. "I've just received the galley to the fifth book in the series, and she is going to be the most popular kid in class when she brings that galley into school."
Though reviewers have compared this series to the Harry Potter tales ("Harry Potter from hell, you might call them," quipped reporter Leah McLaren in Canada's The Globe and Mail), retailers generally believe that the strongest similarity between the two series is the ease of handselling them rather than their content. Several booksellers did note, however, that they were apt to recommend Handler's books to parents of Harry Potter fans waiting for Harry Potter #4.
Though Lemony Snicket's sales are not at Harry Potter-like heights, Harper reports that each successive volume rolls out with a larger first printing than the last. This bodes well, if clearly not for the fate of the young Baudelaires, at least for the success of future titles in the series, which will total an unlucky 13. It looks as though the orphans may get a chance to be miserable on screen as well: Nickelodeon has purchased film and television rights and currently has the series under development with its Nickelodeon Films division. And word of the youngsters' travails will soon travel overseas, as foreign rights have been sold in Germany, Italy, Norway and Denmark.
Obviously, the author's knack for combining the dark with the droll has hit a nerve just about everywhere--except Decatur, Ga. There, a school canceled Handler's scheduled visit because teachers objected to Count Olaf's utterance of the word "damn" in The Reptile Room. "Out of all the uses of this word in children's literature, this has to be the mildest," commented a bewildered Handler. "And its use was precipitated by a long discussion of how one should never say this word, since only a villain would do so vile a thing! This is exactly the lily-liveredness of children's books that I can't stand. So now I can say, whatever happens in my literary career, they can't take away from me the fact that my books have been banned in Georgia." And, of course, banished from the annals of happy endings.
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