The ignominious interview

SNICKETY SNAPSHOT Daniel Handler likes his shirts Lemony-fresh.

Photo: Meredith Heuer

An 11th book, a hot-ticket movie, an audiobook—Lemony Snicket will be hard to avoid this winter. And that's bad news for anyone who's looking for life to be smiley-faced. Suffice it to say that the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his real name is far less Brit than the one he's assumed—er, Daniel Handler?) has tapped into his tender readers' most eccentrically dark fantasies. With two books left to go in the series (Handler has promised to end it with—what else?—the 13th book), one can only wonder what gloomy gothic pursuits Handler's fans will turn to after learning the ultimate fate of the Baudelaire orphans (Violet, Klaus and Sunny) and the diabolical Count Olaf.

"My first memory is pretty gothic. My first memory is rolling around in a birdcage on a Persian carpet under a grand piano." But wait! This is not Handler's voice. It's the voice of Stephin Merritt—Handler's friend, sometime collaborator and coconspirator in goth lunacy. Handler occasionally plays accordion with Merritt's band the Magnetic Fields; Merritt, with the Gothic Archies (another of his bands), has been writing music for each Snicket audiobook.

One day this fall, Merritt and Handler both happened to find themselves—and, therefore, each other—in Central Park….

Stephin Merritt So, what are you doing here at Belvedere Castle?

Daniel Handler I make a point of trying to visit as many eerie places as I can find in New York. This, however, has turned out to be depressingly sylvan. And much more like a miniature-golf course than, say, something one might find on a moor. What are you doing at Belvedere Castle?

Stephin I'm lost in Central Park, actually.

Daniel That's a much more common reason for people to end up at Belvedere Castle.

Stephin We seem to be in the middle of the Ramble. This being TONY Kids, I have nothing to say about that.

OLAF RIOT Jim Carrey plays the nefarious Count.

Daniel We're here to discuss the idea of the gothic. Where would you place yourself in the spectrum, from pop to literary, of gothic appreciation?

Stephin Off in the Edward Gorey corner of the triangle that that implies.

Daniel Me, too. I recently visited Edward Gorey's house in Cape Cod, which has been transformed into a museum of astonishing paucity. There is a pair of shoes he wore when he was a youngster, and a collection of his drawings, and a few T-shirts for sale, and in the kitchen, a photograph of the kitchen, in which Edward Gorey appears.

Stephin Does the photograph appear in the kitchen in the photograph?

Daniel No.

Stephin Damn!

Daniel Yes, it's not a Pink Floyd album cover. And what I was shocked by was that, of all the people who should have a grave that you can visit, it should be Edward Gorey, and that instead, he was cremated. So there's no death site of Edward Gorey—which I found to be quite disappointing. Copies of my first two books were sent to Mr. Gorey shortly after they were published, and shortly after that, he died. I don't know whether the books killed him, but...

Stephin There was something else in the package!

Daniel It seems like the package was probably unopened in a pile of unopened packages he left. Still, I like to think that the last thing he read was my stories.

Stephin You'll find out on your deathbed, of course.

Daniel When a package is sent to me…

Stephin Saying, "This is the unopened package you sent to Edward Gorey just before he died."

Daniel Signed, Edward Gorey. An acorn has fallen, indicating that we should change the subject. When did gothic begin to influence the music that you write?

Stephin The first band I was ever in was a gothic band. I think we were called the Black Widowers. I was 12. I remember one of the song titles was "Satan's Child," and we played only on Halloween.

Daniel I came to gothic music fairly late. It was when I saw a revival of The Hunger at the Red Vic theater in San Francisco, around 1984. And that was the first time I heard "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus, and it had an enormous effect on me.

Stephin For those who don't know, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" can be described as a gothic-rock classic.

Daniel Nonmelodic vocals, distorted percussion.

Stephin Two-note melody. Dressing in black and having messy hair.

Daniel Cavernous percussion.

Stephin Ill-applied makeup in red and black. Minor keys. Certain perversities.

Daniel Whereas the hallmarks of gothic literature are in some ways the opposite—it's always painstakingly constructed.

Stephin Exquisitely applied makeup.

Daniel Elaborate production and not repetitive. The fascinating thing about gothic novels is that the same thing never happens twice in a row. It seems sometimes that if you reread a novel by Wilkie Collins, they've changed aspects of it since you last read it.

Daniel So, is the world getting more gothic or less gothic as we proceed through the new century?

Stephin My assistant has taken a part-time job at a teen-girl clothing store, and she assures me that all the girls now want to be preppy again. Which means that the next swing is going to be drastically toward gothic. So by next year: all black, all the time.

Daniel Right, and Mr. Snicket will fade into the woodwork as prep comes back.

Stephin Or maybe the Baudelaires will go to school, finally. Maybe they'll get into a prep school.

Daniel Well, Prufrock Preparatory School was a prep school of sorts. They attended very briefly in the fifth volume. It just didn't work out that well.

Stephin I'm not sure if Esme Squalor [the childrens' pretentious guardian in the sixth volume] would consider it a prep school.

Daniel No, I'm sure Esme Squalor would be quite snobby about it.

Stephin So, I think the Esme attitude is what's currently in, and we'll get to the Count Olaf attitude next year.

Daniel Yes, next year. Men dressed as Esme Squalor will be all the rage. Speaking of slippery identities—you and I share an affection for slippery identities—do you think they reflect a gothic influence?

Stephin Maybe it's more that we appreciate that part of the gothic because of other slippery identities we fall into.

Daniel Certainly a world-weary and distant narrator is part of a long-standing gothic literary tradition that Mr. Snicket follows. So, do you have any gothic-literary questions to ask me?

Stephin Why, yes, I do. What is gothic children's literature if Hans Christian Andersen is mainstream children's literature?

Daniel Well, my immediate answer would be that Grimms' fairy tales are the flip side of Hans Christian Andersen's.

Stephin Well, I've just been doing a play with Hans Christian Andersen stories, and most of them are about little girls dying in pathetic ways, like in Edward Gorey's stories.

Daniel Whereas in Grimm Brothers', the girl is usually tricked and then dies. I think that gothic children's literature looks like a cautionary tale but actually contains no sort of moral whatsoever, so your behavior does not necessarily lead to your fate.

Stephin So it doesn't really matter what you do, you're going to drown?

Daniel Exactly.

Stephin Doesn't really matter whether you're near the water, you're going to drown. Do you like cautionary tales themselves? Or do you prefer the faux cautionary tales?

Daniel Well, when I was a child, I really liked the cautionary tales, but I think I just liked how they ended. There's something wonderful about what happens to all the children in Shockheaded Peter [editor's note: see "Shock treatment"], but you don't believe for a moment that if they had behaved better they would somehow have been spared those fates. And certainly in real life, I don't find that any moral lessons seem to hold water. We're all likely to drown regardless of our behavior. And although I'm not necessarily fond of realistic literature, there needs to be enough realism that you believe in the story. And random punishment seems like precisely that level of realism.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events opens December 17.