Friday 15 August 2014

Chapter-by-Chapter: The Miserable Mill

There will just be a single post today as we’re moving on to the next book in the Series of Unfortunate Events, The Miserable Mill. The first Chapter-by-Chapter post will go up on Monday morning. In the meantime, we’ll take a look at the cover and see what, if anything, I can remember about it.


This book has an orange spine with the same spiky plant pattern in it. The ‘ribbon’ alongside this is a jaggedy saw blade pattern in a reddish sort of a colour.

This is the first book so far not to show all three Baudelaires on the cover. It’s just got Klaus with one of the lenses of his glasses badly cracked. I think his outfit looks quite snazzy, there’s a definite Victorian feel to the outfits that the children are pictured wearing.

In the background there are two things of note. One is a building with chimneys which are belching out smoke. This is evidently the titular mill. In front of the mill but still behind Klaus is someone wearing dungarees and holding up two pans. The person in question can’t really be seen very clearly because they have  a mask over their mouth and nose. It may be significant that this person only has one eyebrow.

Much of what I remember of the original three books is heavily influenced by the film adaptation, so I’m a little bit sketchier on what happens in this one. I know that Mr Poe is beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel as they don’t have many relatives left; presumably the relatives they do still have are wary of taking on the Baudelaires because acceptance of them as their wards pretty much is a signature to their death warrant.

I know that the mill does some bizarre mundane task and the employees work without pay. I think there’s a character who is known as ‘Sir’ because his actual name is long and unpronounceable. I pointed out the glasses sign at the end of the last book and I know that comes into it somewhere, but I don’t have a clue exactly how or where.


We’ll kickstart this one on Monday afternoon and get the first five chapters read next week.

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