evil and beautiful

This is just...brilliant.

A PR company promoting the Lemony Snicket books has created a bogus campaign against children's books without happy endings. Especially that bad, bad Lemony Snicket:

THEF was originally founded in 2000 by Adrienne Small after she read the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket to her daughter. As well as making her feel thoroughly miserable, Mrs Small noticed her daughter seemed to take a more negative approach to life. Sadly, this situation worsened substantially, as her daughter subsequently read all 13 books in the series.

They then managed to get the campaign covered in the Mail, the Guardian and various other places, including lots of mentions (and pictures) of Lemony Snicket.

Impressive.

[from here, via dennyd]