A Series of Unfortunate Events
Afterword
Opposites are strange things in many ways. Some things have widely accepted opposites which everyone accepts to be correct.
Very few people would disagree with you, for instance, if you said that the opposite of light is dark. Even fewer would challenge you if you said that the opposite of day is night.
However, if you were to ask someone what the opposite of a pillow is, one person might say a very different thing than another, simply depending on what their experience with pillows has been.
You might ask one person what the opposite of a pillow is, and they might say a sandwich, because they have had a dream of eating a sandwich, only to wake up and find they have been eating their pillow, and have decided that sandwiches and pillows are completely different things.
You might ask another person what the opposite of a pillow is, and they might say a crying baby, because they have had the experience of caring for an upset infant in the middle of the night, and they decided that the baby caused them to become fatigued, and the pillow caused them to enjoy brief periods of relaxation before the baby began crying again.
If you asked me what the opposite of a pillow is, I would say a piece of sand on the beach of Oahu, because of an experience I had several years ago that involved a gingerbread house, a semi-aquatic animal, and a miniature telephone pole.
However, no one could honestly disagree with you if you said that the opposite of the tragic tale of the Baudelaire orphans would be a bright, happy story in which all people involved lived happily ever after. You had much better go read a story that is the opposite of this terrible one. Such a story would be ridiculously cheerful, completely unrealistic, and most likely rather boring, but at least you would not spend your days wailing as you read these pages, and your nights wishing for your pillow to turn into its opposite, so you could escape the dreadful thoughts of what happened to the three Baudelaire orphans: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny.