Mind The Menace

A retrospective look at “A Series of Unfortunate Events”

If you’re interested in reading about the upcoming Netflix series, you would be better off reading some other article.

In this article, not only is there only cursory discussion of the upcoming series, there is little to no mention of the movie with Jim Carrey, except for the one that was just mentioned and a brief comparison of the two at the article’s conclusion.

This is because the article is about the “A Series of Unfortunate Events” book series by Lemony Snicket, the observer of these events and Daniel Handler, his transcriber.

The 13 books followed the unfortunate lives of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. Following the tragic death of their parents in an unexplained house fire, the three attempt to survive both the world around them and the antagonist Count Olaf, a heartless man out to get their family fortune.

Though classified as “children’s fiction,” the only thing childlike about the series is that the protagonists themselves are children. The books deal largely with adult themes and contain many instances of violence and cruelty, both toward the children and those they interact with.

I started this book series when I was ten. Ten years old is a strange time for anyone, with the sunset of single digit age behind you and the ominous night of adolescence only a few years away. Books for this age are even stranger to find. One is no longer satisfied with teachers from the Black Lagoon, but neither is one yet interested in discovering the true nature of Frankenstein’s monster.

“A Series of Unfortunate Events” provided a good stepping stone for this transitional age. It was the first time I ever had to read about death and misery. I’d always been a fan of darker stories, even as a child, but the stories were always comical and provided reassurance at each conclusion.

That was never the case with this series.

With its dry wit, caustic dialogue, and miserable plot, “A Series of Unfortunate Events” was a children’s series that created children with a better understanding of the world they were to eventually grow up into.

Granted, it was unlikely that your parents belonged to a secret organization and that the vast network of people they worked alongside had such strange and idiosyncratic professions. It was even more unlikely that you and your siblings would be singularly responsible for the burning down of a hotel and framed for a murder.

Yet it was through that wildly improbable and fantastical series of events that the books broadcast their message: life had a penchant for being unfair and sometimes you needed to deal with it.

The series also succeeded in reminding us that it was impossible to get answers to all the questions you had.

More than often than not, knowledge of these answers would only lead you to more questions. Book 13 — simply titled “The End” — was only the end of Count Olaf. His death and the following epilogue only left the Baudelaire children and their readers with more questions.

Despite the book series ending ten years ago, the unfortunate events continue. Netflix announced in November of 2014 that it was making a live-action series adaptation of it. Neil Patrick Harris was cast as Count Olaf, Malina Weissman as Violet, Louis Hynes as Klaus, and Patrick Warburton as the voice of Lemony Snicket.

Appropriately, the season will have 13 episodes. Handler will co-executive produce the series and write a majority of the episodes.

“A Series of Unfortunate Events” was a book series that depicted what lies at childhood’s inevitable end through events that were overly dramatic and wildly impossible. It created a suitable literary transition for young readers into more adult fiction. The Netflix series will undoubtedly have a lot on its hands in making those elements shine through.

With hope, we won’t have another repeat of the film, with the comedy overshadowing the tragedy that is the life of the Baudelaire children.

With hope, the series will avoid this aberrant direction — a word here which means “very, very wrong and causing much grief.”

Illustrations from “The Series of Unfortunate Events” by Brett Helquist

Originally published at www.lbunion.com.