Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk … it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps.

There are also frequent interjections of a punctilious or Lynne Trussian nature: thus, during the course of the book a child, or an adult, might find useful and workable definitions of, among other things, a ‘moral compass’, the correct usage of ‘revere’ and possible meanings of the word ‘ferment’. This is quite interesting.

It also probably helps that Handler’s unfortunate events function exactly as the kind of reversals and recognitions that Aristotle defined as essential to tragedy in The Poetics.

But perhaps the key to the books’ success — or rather, their successive successes — is simply that they somehow seem meaningful and interesting and significant. Pocket-sized, hard-backed and illustrated in a sub-Edward Gorey fashion by someone called Brett Helquist, they are a spectacle and phenomenon in their own right. In addition to the prolonged and peculiar mysteries (who is Lemony Snicket, and what exactly is his relationship to the children?), there is all of the surrounding guff and mystique about the author (who is the mysterious trilby-wearing Mr Handler?). At worst, Snicket merely fascinates. Most of us — most authors and most books — merely bore.

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