A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Hostile Hospital (8)

Condition: New, Hardcover

Author: Lemony Snicket

Illustrator: Brett Helquist

The Hostile Hospital is the eighth novel in the book series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. After running away from everyone, both dear and hateful, the Baudelaire orphans are chased around a literally half-built hospital by Count Olaf and his evil associates.

Plot Summary

Having previously escaped V.F.D. (Village of Fowl Devotees) in the previous book, the three Baudelaire children (Violet, Klaus, and Sunny) are walking alone and hungry. Soon, however, they encounter a general store called Last Chance General Store, and are kindly taken in by the shopkeeper, who lets them send a telegram to Mr. Poe. The newspaperman then arrives and gives The Daily Punctilio newspapers to the shopkeeper, who recognizes the picture of the three Baudelaires (credited as the murderers of Count Olaf) immediately. He and the newspaperman pursue the children through the store and are about to catch them when a van suddenly pulls up, allowing the Baudelaires to jump in an escape.

Inside the van, the children meet a group of singing people called the Volunteers Fighting Disease, who sing to sick people at Heimlich Hospital to cheer them up. Since they never read The Daily Punctilio newspaper, the children figure it is alright to travel with them, and head to the hospital. Once they arrive, Babs (a voice on the intercom) says that people are needed to file files in the Library of Records. The children are eager to the job, so they head to Babs' office, where they are given the job. Luckily, Babs does not even see them because she is just a voice on a small intercom speaker. In the Library of Records, the children meet Hal, the keeper of the library, and help him file papers. Since they have nowhere to sleep, the Baudelaires decide to secretly sleep in the unfinished wing of the hospital. Reviewing the notes of the Quagmires, they discover the existence of the Snicket File and successfully retrieve the thirteenth page. On it there is a picture of their parents, Jacques Snicket, and another man whom they do not recognize. Alongside the photograph reads: Because of the evidence discussed on page 9, experts now suspect that there may in fact be 1 survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown. At that moment, however, Esme Squalor (Count Olaf's evil girlfriend) appears and begins knocking down the shelves to crush the children. Klaus and Sunny manage to escape up a chute with the page, but Violet is too big to go through and is captured.

Klaus and Sunny soon discover that Count Olaf and his associates are going to perform a craniectomy on Violet, and decide that they need to hurry and find her. Retrieving the list of patients from the singing volunteers, the two Baudelaires hide in a closet and try to find Violet, but she is not on the list. Thinking of the Quagmires' notes, they realize that Olaf is using anagrams for his false names (Al Funcoot and Flacutono and Lucafont, some previous names, being anagrams of Count Olaf), and try to find Violet, who is really Laura V. Bleedotie. Masquerading as the two white-faced women, Klaus and Sunny go into contact with the hook-handed man (as O. Lucafont) and the bald man (as Flacutono) and find Violet unconscious. The party heads to the operating theater, where Klaus and Sunny stall the cranioectomy by describing the past of the knife. Hal appears at that moment and accuses them of setting fire to the Library of Records, while Esme turns up with the real white-faced women and exposes them. With the group about to capture them, Klaus and Sunny escape on Violet's gurney and hide inside a closet while the fire in the hospital grows. Violet soon wakes up and, as Babs, announces that the Baudelaires are hiding in the unfinished wing of the hospital. She invents a bungee jump cord from rubber bands, and they all escape safely out of the hospital. Trying to escape the fires of the outside of the hospital, the children hide in the trunk of Count Olaf's car secretly along with Olaf and his associates (all except the one that looks like neither a man or a woman, who was posing a guard; it was killed in the fire). All the Baudelaires do is hope to go someplace better while Olaf's car rides off.

Series Summary

The series follows the adventures of three siblings, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, after their parents were killed in a fire at the family mansion. In The Bad Beginning, they briefly live with a friend of their parents, Mr. Poe, who is the person in charge of the Baudelaire fortune after the Baudelaire parents' deaths, before being sent to live with Count Olaf, whom Mr. Poe describes as either the siblings' "third cousin four times removed, or their fourth cousin three times removed". The siblings discover that he intends to get his hands on the Baudelaire fortune, which awaits Violet, the eldest child, when she turns eighteen. In the first seven books, Olaf, each time in different disguises, follows the children wherever they go so he can get closer to the orphans and steal their fortune. Their roles switch in the eighth through twelfth books, in which the orphans adopt disguises while on the run from the police after being framed by Count Olaf, disguised as Detective Dupin, for the murder of Count Omar (really Jacques Snicket). The Baudelaires routinely try to get help from Mr. Poe, but Poe is always either busy with work, oblivious to the danger Olaf poses, unaware that the disguised Olaf is not who he claims to be or simply thinks the Baudelaires are lying.

Each of the three siblings has a distinctive skill that often helps them during their adventures. Violet is always inventing new things to help them, Klaus is always finding out new information by reading books, and Sunny has extremely sharp teeth that can bite almost anything in two. [4] In later books, Sunny learns how to cook, as she begins to grow to the normal size for her teeth so cooking becomes her primary skill. Sunny originally spoke in single word utterances which are often a variety of incomplete sentences and some short word sentences as well. Their meaning is either disguised by being spelled phonetically (e.g., 'surchmi' in The Slippery Slope), backwards (e.g., 'edasurc' [crusade] in The Carnivorous Carnival) through cultural references (Sunny says: 'Matahari', followed by a definition of 'If I stay, I can spy on them and find out.'), or being written in other languages (e.g., Shalom or Sayonara), but eventually she begins to speak more in complete English sentences, her first possibly being "I'm not a baby" in The Slippery Slope, or "Like me" in The Vile Village.

Lemony Snicket, the author of the stories and the pseudonym of Daniel Handler, is actually a character himself on the periphery of the stories. He follows the Baudelaires, researching and recording their exploits. Bruce Butt noted in 2002 that in each book a letter from Snicket to his editor is included, presented as exciting updates on Snicket's research into the Baudelaire orphans, which Butt considered to be "the slyest aspect of the way this series has been ingeniously promoted". Over the course of the series, the Baudelaires learn some vague information about Snicket and possibly meet him briefly in The Wide Window and The Penultimate Peril.

1. The Bad Beginning
2. The Reptile Room
3. The Wide Window
4. The Miserable Mill
5. The Austere Academy
6. The Ersatz Elevator
7. The Vile Village
8. The Hostile Hospital
9. The Carnivorous Carnival
10. The Slippery Slope
11. The Grim Grotto
12. The Penultimate Peril
13. The End

A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Hostile Hospital (8)