An Excellent Reason to be Naughty: Lemony Snicket’s The Lump of Coal

December 14, 2008 | 3 books mentioned 2 min read

coverWhat is not to love about a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking? If it’s Lemony Snicket’s Christmas children’s book for adults The Lump of Coal, I assure you, it is all lovable – even the copyright page (laid out concrete-poetry style in the shape of Christmas tree). The Lump of Coal tells the story of holiday miracles: not the ones you probably know (“the story of a candelabra staying lit for more than a week, or a baby born in a barn without proper medical supervision”), but the story of (you guessed it), a lump of coal, who “like many people who dress in black… was interested in becoming an artist. The lump of coal dreamed of a miracle – that one day it would get to draw rough, black lines on a canvas or, more likely, on a breast of chicken or salmon filet by participating in a barbeque.”

I will hardly spoil the ending by assuring you that these dreams come true – and that the path to them is charmingly illustrated (as were the Series of Unfortunate Events) by Brett Helquist. And that the lump’s adventures are marked by Mr. Snicket’s signature narratorial interruptions of his story for cryptic personal revelations, his idiosyncratic definitions of words possibly not familiar to his audience, and his winning mix of the fantastic and the depressingly mundane. For any of you who know Tim Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories (which includes several Christmas offerings – my favorite, “James,” features a Burton drawing a Santa-suited arm offering a teddy bear to a doubtful looking little boy who has several parallel gashes across one eye; the text reads: “Unwisely, Santa offered a teddy bear to James, unaware that he had been mauled by a grizzly bear earlier that year.”) – The Lump adds another volume to the genre of Edward Gorey-ian cynical, morbid, and eccentric illustrated works that take the form of children’s stories but are really much more for grown ups.

(Oh, yes – and a final note: The Lump of Coal is elusive (which in this case means it likes to hide from employees and shoppers in bookstores). An indefatigable Vroman’s employee did managed to find it for me yesterday, but it hid from him for a good fifteen minutes, and this was the second bookstore I’d been to in search of it. At the first, The Stanford Bookstore, not one of the twenty copies in stock could be found.)

is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.