Horror without Monsters: A Carrollian Reading of Daniel Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events

By using Noel Carroll’s theory of art-horror this paper studies how horror functions in Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The series creates a continuous and strong feeling of fear that works beyond a normal children’s adventure story, although it is usually described as children’s gothic fiction. Noel Carroll opines that horror creates if a character is both dangerous and impure. Using Carroll’s idea, the paper explains that a character Count Olaf is not only a villain but also an immoral human that has monstrous nature. He is not a supernatural monster as we read in gothic fictions. He is a bad person in the story. He does wrong things on purpose. He works against children. But the important thing here is that his impurity does not come from his physically unnaturalness, but from his unethical actions and his misuse of social roles such as guardian of the Baudelaire children or authority figure in the family. Count Olaf repeatedly gets failure of adults in the series and he tries to do villainous actions again and again that increases the sense of horror in the story. The problem is not only the character Olaf as a villain, but also the larger system that includes the people who come as the guardian of the children after their parent’s death. They all fail to protect children. The paper shows that Handler has reshaped horror for young readers by the connecting it to ideas from Gothic novels It also becomes a form of social criticism because it reflects dark irony, and unstable social structures that operate throughout the series. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events proves that always horror does not need supernatural creatures like God, Goddess, deity, fairies and ghosts or souls. If the characters from the novel are corrupted and immoral, their moral corruption and activities of social breakdown create fear or horror. Noel Carroll’s theory explains the horror that can be understood as a modern form of horror that describes monstrosity in the ethical world rather than in the paranormal that cannot be explained by science or normal nature of laws.