opening a book I thought would be something like the spooky books by Stephen King or V. C. Andrews I read sometimes,

It’s easy to tag all this as camp, an ironic appreciation for junk culture that, what with the amount of available junk, is endlessly renewable.

“It’s turning into an orgy,” was my go-to joke for such friendly, unwieldy times, until I was publicly chastised by another children’s author for saying such a horrid thing. (By strange coincidence, I had written a critical review of her work some years previous.) “It probably didn’t occur to you,” she said, “that some of the women in the lobby

I always said that Lemony Snicket couldn’t be there at the bookstore, that I was his official representative and thus a guaranteed disappointment, and the young people grasped at once that I was somebody pretending to be somebody pretending to be somebody.

as we age, our shock is when we can change anything at all before the curtain rings down. The

In this whole book I’ve tried to lay out my canon for anyone who might be interested, little pieces entangled necessarily with little pieces of my life, because of this ecstasy.

a sequence of suspicious catastrophes” sounds like a bulky first draft of the title of my thirteen-volume orphan opus.

Be steadfast and true and the world which surrounds you, even as it seems chaotic and menacing, will treat you kindly in turn. I won’t waste any ink reminding you this is nonsense, because if you are reading this, you are here in the world and you already know.

Charlotte had finally sold The Basic Eight for the least amount of money she had ever negotiated for a book of fiction, and now two volumes about sad orphans in horrific trouble in a world fashioned by my own literary obsessions were failing, to no one’s surprise if only because there was no one there to witness it, in Lansing. Even published, my