By the sixth installment, Lemony Snicket has trained his readers to expect the worst and to enjoy expecting it. The Baudelaire orphans arrive at a penthouse belonging to very, very rich people, an address the description places unnervingly near the site where all their troubles first began, and the pattern reasserts itself immediately. This audiobook runs four hours and twenty-three minutes with Tim Curry named as narrator, and it is worth saying at the outset that the Snicket books belong to a small group of children's series that were, in a real sense, written to be read aloud.
The description supplies its own inventory of what is coming, and that list is the best short demonstration of Snicket's method available anywhere: "a darkened staircase, a red herring, an auction, parsley soda, some friends in a dire situation, a secret passageway, and pinstripe suits." Nothing in that catalogue is arbitrary. Each item is a promise that will be honored literally and then twisted, and the pleasure lies in watching an author who has told you exactly what will happen still surprise you with how. Few children's writers trust their readers quite that far.
The satire in this entry aims at fashion, and the narrowness of the target sharpens it. The wealthy couple who take the children in are rich in the way that demands constant upkeep, forever adjusting their tastes to whatever has been declared correct that week, and the orphans arrive less as children than as accessories to a fashionable household. Snicket's models are named in the description, which promises "an exquisitely dark comedy in the tradition of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl." This book earns the Gorey half in particular: the cruelty is architectural, arriving through shafts and staircases rather than through raised voices.
Why It Works in Audio
Now the feature that makes this series unusual in spoken form. In most recordings the narrator is a delivery mechanism standing outside the story. Here the narrator is a character inside it. Lemony Snicket is a person within the fiction, a man with his own grief and his own dangerous research, who interrupts to define a word, to warn you off, to mourn a woman named Beatrice. The reading is therefore not a performance of the text so much as a performance of a role the text has already written. Tim Curry is credited with that role, and the casting question becomes one of persona rather than of clarity. I find that the most interesting casting problem in children's audio, because the job sits closer to playing a part than to reading a book.
The vocabulary device is the other format asset. Snicket halts constantly to explain a word, and the explanations are jokes at least as often as they are definitions. Spoken, that plays as a person talking to you rather than as a glossary, which is exactly the effect the printed page works hardest to manufacture. Elam Family, five stars, describes the reader this suits precisely: a nine-year-old reading at a twelfth-grade level, for whom the obstacle was never decoding words but finding books whose content matched an advanced reading age. Angie, also five stars, describes the other use, taking the series on a river trip because the books are "great for all ages and fun to read as a family."
What to Watch For in Series of Unfortunate Events #6: The Ersatz Elevator
The most useful notice in the pool is also the most critical, and it outweighs the four five-star entries combined. Judy, at four stars, calls this one "Not the strongest of his volumes so far" and then explains what redeems it: "it adds to the mystery of the Books dedications." What follows is a careful accounting of everything those dedications have disclosed about Beatrice, that she is dead, that she asked too late where Count Olaf was, that a friend painted a triptych titled "What Happened to Beatrice" whose panels show a fire, a typewriter and a woman's face. That is a reader tracking a puzzle across volumes. Such readers are the series' real constituency, and I have yet to meet one who started at the sixth book.
Which is exactly the warning. This series buries its long-form clues in dedications, epigraphs and asides, precisely the material a listener glides past and a reader can flip back to. Judy's grade also flags the structural risk of an entry this deep into a formula, since the books repeat a shape and this one is being measured against five predecessors. The reviewers even disagree about order. Angie reports that each book tells a different adventure and "you don't have to read them in order," while Judy's entire notice argues that the sequence carries a hidden narrative. Both are correct about different layers of the same series.
Two smaller notes. Only two ratings underpin the 4.6 shown here, a sample that establishes nothing whatever, so weigh the five written notices instead and disregard the number. And the listing files this recording under education, a categorization certain to misdirect anyone browsing for classroom material. This is gothic comic fiction about orphaned children in continuous danger, however drily that danger is handled, and no part of it sets out to instruct. The one genuinely educational side effect, a steady diet of unusual vocabulary explained in context, is a joke the book is telling rather than a curriculum it is following.
Who Will Get the Most From It
The natural audience is a household rather than an individual. Angie's river-trip note gets at why: the jokes operate on two levels at once, the vocabulary asides hand an adult something to enjoy while a child enjoys the calamity, and a runtime just over four hours fits a long drive with room to spare. Advanced young readers in the position Elam Family describes, decoding far above their emotional age, are the other clear fit, because Snicket's difficulty is verbal rather than thematic and the dread is stylized rather than genuinely frightening.
Start elsewhere if you need a standalone. This entry assumes five books of accumulated grievance and never pauses to summarize them, and while the plot resolves, the emotional arithmetic does not. Anyone allergic to the series' central joke, a narrator who keeps advising you to stop, will find the joke has not softened by the sixth outing. And anyone chasing the Beatrice thread specifically should keep a printed copy within reach, because those dedications Judy tracks so carefully are the one element these books cannot easily hand you by ear.
Do I need the first five books before starting this audiobook?
Strongly recommended. The plot of this installment resolves on its own, but five volumes of accumulated history sit behind it and nobody stops to recap. The running mystery around the dedications, which one reviewer tracks in detail across the series, makes even less sense arriving cold at the sixth entry.
Is The Ersatz Elevator too frightening for a young child?
Danger is constant and adults are uniformly useless, yet the tone stays arch and the menace remains architectural rather than bloody. Snicket also keeps interrupting to warn you off, which paradoxically defuses tension. Sensitive listeners under seven may still find the unrelieved misfortune wearing, since no rescue is ever promised.
Does this audiobook work for a family listening together on a car journey?
Unusually well. The vocabulary asides hand adults something to enjoy while children track the calamity, one reviewer describes carrying the series on family river trips, and the length sits comfortably inside a single long drive without needing to be split across two days.
