I don't remember exactly how I came across Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I do remember just how hooked I was when I started to read the first few pages. It was a real antidote to the Harry Potter books, the big forerunning series in the world of children's books. There’s no plucky outsider. There’s no magical solution and there’s no destiny to hope for. Only survival.

On the face of it of course, Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events have much in common. They follow a group of children as they try to make sense of a strange, threatening world in which an evil force is out to get them. More than this, they each blend a mixture of past and present. But where there’s nostalgia for old-fashioned stories about boarding school in the former, everything about the past in A Series of Unfortunate Events is there to add foreboding, from the Victorian wallpaper on the jacket design through to the adults’ insistence on old-fashioned grammar and rules like children should be seen and not heard.

So what's the secret of its success? Well, most of all, I think it's to do with the way Lemony Snicket speaks to the reader. He knows that, if you've read more than a couple of books or seen more than a couple of films, you'll recognize the way in which the story plays its tricks on you. He knows that you've played at creating those stories, and at breaking their rules, yourself. With a knowing nod, he simultaneously subverts them and lets you enjoy them for what they are. And he understands that children are smarter than adults generally take them for.

Because the author is the character who never really appears to the rest of the cast. He's hot on their heels, hunting down the clues and piecing together the evidence, but he never quite makes it into the dramatic limelight. He is our intermediary, the person we have to depend on to make sense of the predicament in which Klaus, Sunny and Violet find themselves. And he’s constantly playing with the boundary between the real world and that of the fictional world of the Baudelaires, as this excerpt from the Miserable Mill shows:

“If you were bored with playing with your chemistry set, and you gave it to your brother in exchange for your dollhouse, that would be a fair deal. If someone offered to smuggle me out of the country in a sailboat, in exchange for free tickets to an ice show, that would be a fair deal.”

Of course, you couldn’t really talk about A Series of Unfortunate Events without Lemony Snicket’s mirror opposite, the nefarious Count Olaf, described as “a treacherous villain, a greedy criminal, and an unpleasant person to meet in social situations”. I love his nefariousness and all the echoes you see him back to German Expressionist cinema and films like Nosferatu. His hook nose, angular features, long fidgety hands and wide eyes all remind me of that. You see those links back to the first horror films throughout the thirteen books, but perhaps most visibly in The Carnivorous Carnival.

The carnival itself is called the Caligari Carnival, hinting back to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, a film about a sleepwalking murderer at a freak show. And so it is that there are “freaks” at the show in this book, ambidextrous Kevin, Hugo the hunchback and Colette the contortionist. You see extremely pale faces in the mysterious twin sisters. Everyone is masquerading and hiding behind a disguise – and none more so that the children’s evil uncle.

So a big theme that runs through the series is the idea of what’s true and what’s false. What and who can you trust? Because the Baudelaires are never in control. They, as children, live their lives at the mercy of the adults in their lives, having to use their ingenuity to survive when their guardians let them down, or when Count Olaf’s plots come perilously close to succeeding. It’s not like those other series where children become magically empowered in some way – because that’s not what children recognize in their own lives.

Perhaps that’s because, as Daniel Handler (the author’s true name), says, “Any book where the bully turned out to be a nice person…or where a villain was defeated by a triumph of integrity rather than, you know, good strong chains, made me angry because I never saw that sort of thing go on in real life. Any evil I saw being defeated was defeated through some shrewd strategy and the occasional large prop, not because we were good children who were going to dissolve the evil emperor with the power of love.”

  -- Natasha Worswick