A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Hostile Hospital

The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket is a mystery for 10 year olds whose narrator spends his first page begging you not to read it.

What happens

He ends sentence after sentence with the word STOP in capitals and explains, at length, that this is your final chance to give up and go and do something nicer.

Then he carries on anyway. So do the Baudelaires.

Violet, Klaus and Sunny have been walking all night across flat unfamiliar country. They are thirsty and lost and exhausted, and the people behind them mean them harm. The only building they reach is called the Last Chance General Store.

The trouble is the newspaper. The Daily Punctilio has told everyone that the three of them are murderers. The shopkeeper inside is kind to them, gives them a free telegram and calls them a talented group of children, entirely because he has not read this morning's edition yet.

So they have to get a message to Mr Poe before Lou turns up with the papers.

Half the pleasure is the man telling you all this. He stops to explain what "stepped to it" means, as though you were four. He goes off on a tangent about an author trapped in an Italian restaurant slowly filling with water. He is funny and bleak in the same breath and never pretends otherwise.

The children are good company too. Violet ties her hair up with a ribbon when she needs to invent her way out of something. Klaus remembers almost every word of almost every book he's read. Sunny has four very sharp teeth, says one word at a time, and her brother and sister translate for her.

This one is not gentle, and it's worth being straight about why. The Baudelaire parents died in a fire. Of the guardians the children have had since, the book says plainly that some were cruel and some were murdered. Klaus turned thirteen in a jail cell. They are being hunted by the police and by a villain called Count Olaf, and nobody with any authority ever believes a word they say.

All of it is delivered deadpan rather than gruesomely, which is exactly why so many children love these. But if yours finds grown-ups who won't listen genuinely distressing, that is the engine of the entire series and it will not let up.

If they already know the Baudelaires, this is one of the books where the V.F.D. business starts properly paying off, and they will feel it.

What to read next

Starting here is possible but you'd be missing a lot. The Vile Village is where the children have just come from. Klaus was still almost thirteen, the Quagmire triplets had just been taken, and a village, a mob and a cell were waiting for them.