As the three Baudelaire orphans warily approach their new home Prufrock Preparatory School, they can't help but notice the enormous stone arch bearing the school's motto "Memento Mori", or "Remember you will die." This is not a cheerful greeting and certainly marks an inauspicious beginning to a very bleak story just as we have come to expect from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, the deliciously morbid set of books that began with The Bad Beginning and only got worse.

Both literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted, A Series of Unfortunate Events offers an exquisitely dark comedy in the tradition of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl. Lemony Snicket's uproariously unhappy books continue to win readers, despite all his warnings.