12 // The Dark / Lemony Snicket, Ill. Jon Klassen

The Dark written by Lemony Snicket , illustrated by Jon Klassen

• Little Brown and Co.

• 2013

• Laszlo is afraid of the dark which lives in the same big creaky house as him, until one night the dark pays him a visit - From publisher

• Would use for smaller kids to talk about facing fears. Dark vs. light.

• I loved the black end papers, then Laszlo's flashlight shining on the title page! The inky speckled texture over the gouache gave the atmosphere of a dusty old house. Klassen did wonderful things with negative space- the dark being an *absence* of something. I loved the line "without the dark, everything would be light, and you would never know if you needed a lightbulb" - that was a quintessential Lemony Snicket line harkening back to Series of Unfortunate events for me.