Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events breaks every rule in the game of children's literature. Its tone is negative: disapproving, depressing and neo-gothic. Its central characters are beset by bad luck at every turn. Three sad, orphaned children are left to fight misfortune alone, save for a series of ill-suited minders and relatives stuck in ramshackle, deadbeat towns, while they struggle to escape the evil clutches of Count Olaf, who is after their inheritance.
The tragi-tale is served in a manner designed to put modern children off. It has a grim, Dickensian cover illustration by Brett Helquist, rough, thick pages and no dust jacket.To cap it all, the book offers an oft-repeated warning not to read it. The first sentence, in the first book, The Bad Beginning, is: 'If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.'
But children from the age of eight have bought or received nearly 10 million copies since the first Lemony Snicket book in 1999. Since then, the 10 titles have sold in 39 countries and been translated into 19 languages. A movie version is being filmed, with Jim Carrey as the evil count.
Author Daniel Handler - Lemony Snicket is his pen name - didn't set out to write children's books. Harper Collins' US publisher Susan Rich dragooned him into the genre after reading his novel The Basic Eight, about elitist high school children.
Handler told her he had no ambitions to write for children, but happened to have a story about an evil count in mind. All he'd have to do was dream up some children to chase - and voila. Four books were commissioned, then four more. The series will end after 13, a suitably unlucky number for the Baudelaire children. Book 10, The Slippery Slope, which has just been released, will be followed by The Grim Grotto next month. The film, which takes in books one to three, is due out in December.
A spokesman for Egmont says: 'There are endless positive children's books where good children have an exciting adventure and it all ends happily, when in reality, horrible things happen to perfectly nice, clever children and there are very few happy endings.'
