incorrect inquiries encouraged.

Voice is everything. Unimaginative reductivists argue that there are no original stories left to tell (which, as a writer, I do not believe), but it's the teller's interpretation which is unique and what makes those stories worth retelling. Within that half-falsity, what makes a Lemony Snicket book is his voice, the redundant, rephrasical, regretful narrator who paints his uncanny world in shades of woe & misfortune.

Second in Snicket's All The Wrong Questions series, When Did You See Her Last? finds our apprenticing secret society autobiographer cutting his teeth on a case of a kidnapped heiress, but in the ghost town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea all isn't as sadly simple as it seems.

Unlike Vonnegut (bleh!) or Robbins (meh!), it's Snicket who uses constantly deft verbal dexterity to reinforce character & narrative, as opposed to an author just showing off at the cost of those same storytelling factors he should be building. It's Lemony who's so wordsmith, and the grasp of language is what gives him an edge, showing that he has the mind enough to define his dilemmas even if he doesn't yet have a true handle on their motives or scope: "I was standing in front of a Dilemma. There are people in the world who care about automobiles, and there are people who couldn't care less, and there are people who are impressed by the Dilemma, and those people are everyone. The Dilemma is such a tremendous thing to look at that I stared at it for a good ten minutes before reminding myself that I should think of it as a clue to a mystery rather than as a wonder of modern engineering. It was one of the newer models, with a small, old-fashioned horn perched just outside of each front window, and a shiny crank on the side so you could roll down the roof if Stain'd-by-the-Sea ever offered pleasant weather, and it was the color of someone buying you an ice cream cone for no reason at all."

Also, Snicket delivers consistently great character names, like Ellington Feint, Moxie Mallahan, Dashiell Qwerty, aside from his own, reaching far outside the usual baby name books to make not just proper nouns but cultural associations.

While the pacing of this book is slightly faster with less lingering descriptions, we still get a few wonderfully hard nutshells via Snicket's implicative encapsulations: "The books and shelves seemed to be in the middle of an argument nobody was winning."

Art by still no-last-named Seth (but we now know he's Canadian, so that narrows it down[?]) trades its predominant blue for purple in the solid graphic style. Sort of warming up to its noir sensibilities by this second book.

[Yes, a fountain pen skyscraper featuring a keyhole breather nib!]

Presentations of vocabulary aside, there's a new device in this series: In the oblique references to other books which are never actually named, Snicket reveals not only literary suggestions, but his influences. Yet these references are also distractions from the real mystery ... if there actually is a real mystery. Kit Snicket, Lemony's sister, keeps getting mentioned as perilously on her own back in the city, and her's is the story untold, yet bookended by Seth's splash pages at the front and back of both installments so far. For those of you who have read A Series of Unfortunate Events, you know how things sort out for intrepid Kit, but we may get the chance to find out how she starts her journey there, and these hints could fill in her arc.

Snicket also waxes philosophical. Between the kids there's a commerce of help, knowledge, and trust. Snicket trades book recommendations for cab rides from a duo of young taxi drivers, the same for breakfasts from teen fry cook Jim Hix, ingenue fatale Ellington Feint trades assistance for Snicket's gallant but possibly misplaced help, reporter Moxie exchanges her local who's-who for Snicket's info toward her unpublished news stories. Snicket argues that all would be more egalitarian if seen through the leveling eyes of youth and run by children, that adults get compromised and give up, while children with their untarnished optimism do not: "'You said we could make our organization greater than ever, but only if we stopped listening to our instructors and found new ways to fix the world. It was quite the speech you gave, It almost got you thrown out for good.'" And with that suddenly Lemony may become responsible for an event that does change everything.

While not as fresh as Who Could That Be At This Hour?,  there are revelations and far-reaching implications that Snicket's liminal role as hesitant documentarian for ASOUE may be much more involved than we ever suspected. While Snicket's world's never played with the supernatural, one dares to think that with hidden cult-like fraternities, octopi, a strange idol, the decaying seaside town, and constant fear of the unknown, that something Lovecraftian might dare to rear its scaly head? We dare hope.

April 1st, 2014, sees the release of not a third installment, but a collection of mini-mysteries set in the ATWQ world, File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents.

[Or is it an April Fool's publishing joke? So suspect, Snicket!]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

you aren't asking the right questions.

Pedantic. Indulgent. Self-referential.

And for those you who still think from the above I'm going to bash Lemony Snicket's latest series "All the Wrong Questions", think again. No, these are the exact qualities we've missed since the conclusion of "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" ended with its 13th (really 15th if we include the Autobiography & companion Beatrice Letters) book from 2006.

A very gradual first in a quartet prequel, our Mr. Snicket begins by relating his field apprenticeship at a mere 13 years old for an unnamed secret society and his subsequent unwilling involvement in a Maltese Falcon style noir. And since Who Could That Be At This Hour's a prequel, one doesn't have to have read ASOUE to join in on the mystery. As with most noir, we start with the water well above our heads in the deep end of the pool, everything being totally suspect as it most likely isn't what it seems, and you spend the time playing catch up and treading the rising level of danger along with our protagonist. Like ASOUE's 13 chapters per book, this volume ticks its tale off with that identical unlucky structure.

The same great voice & style of Mr Snicket, full of zingers & payoffs, plus the seemingly truthful obtuseness of the world and his stymied frustration at seeing it all too clearly while no one else around him does, contextualizes our baffled onrush into the maw of unseen dark doings. (Yes, my Gothics, this one's so for you.) It's the classic children's lit & young adult (which usually means "dumbed down mediocrity for the passably literate", but which instead here means "a gameful sophistication at play") backdrop trope of the incompetent adults versus the emotionally perceptive youths. That dichotomy isn't just used but made painfully self-aware in our narrator to win our empathy as readers, and recalls the ancient child in us all.

With great similes like "hands as soft as old lettuce" or "hair so black it made the night look pale", one imagines Snicket's pen dancing from line to skillful line in poetic gran jetes of associative thought.

A constant earmark of the ASOUE was presenting the vocab, and it's present here:

"'What does kowtowing mean?'

'To behave in an obsequious manner.'

'I could play this game all night, Mr. Snicket. What does obsequious mean?'"

Or, more reflexively:

"He's a terrible man. He's despicable. He's loathsome, a word here which means terrible and despicable."

(Lexical boomerang to yo' face!)

[Ooh, bats & hair ribbons! You know you like them!]

Brett Helquist's art is absent, instead using black & white solids paneled with blue by Seth (no last name? Tres mystérieux!). While Seth has great graphic design sensibilities that remind one of Jaime Hernandez' work, one misses the pairing with Helquist's more line driven tension, which takes some cues from Edward Gorey. But that's apples & oranges, fruits here which aren't really fruits but mild discomfort at an unanticipated change.

[Hemlock Tearoom! You kill me, Snicket! *drinkee drinkee* *erk!*]

The legitimate critique of Mr. Snicket's offerings is that the plot never wraps up completely, that even if we were asking all the right questions, he wouldn't provide all the answers, right or otherwise. We suspect that even he doesn't have them, that the voice and flavour of his characters and environs are more mood and anxiety driven than clearly causal or sensibly linear, and if the story's final destination were to deliver complete solutions those facts might ultimately undermine any emotional resolution the climax delivers. Still, that really does leave one wanting. (Yes, I wrote a more angsty than thankful letter to our author, a.k.a. Daniel Handler, enumerating my many inquiries when I'd finished the 2,000+ pages [!] of ASOUE, but maybe I wasn't asking the right questions ... .) Perhaps, like life, it isn't ever meant to give up all its infinite mysteries. (Or he's totally mucking about at our expense? 'Fess up, Snicket!)

[The second ATWQ installment, When Did You See Her Last?, came out October 2013, and I'm sticking it in my shopping cart right now.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.