The Basic Eight
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| Author | Daniel Handler |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Fiction, Satire, Black Comedy |
| Publisher | Thomas Dunne Books |
| Released | April 1999 |
| Pages | 329 (1st edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-312-19833-7(1st edition) |
The Basic Eight is a novel by Daniel Handler. Flannery Culp is a senior (12th grader) at Roewer High School in San Francisco. 'Flan', as she calls herself, records all her experiences in a diary that becomes this book. She and her seven close friends refer to themselves as "The Basic Eight," and the eight teens regularly hold formal dinners to relieve themselves from the stresses of high school. After Flan writes love letters to her love interest while on summer vacation, the lives of the members of the Basic Eight are turned upside down by revealed secrets, horrifying self-discoveries, and naturally, satanic murder.
The Basic Eight is full of sarcastic plot devices that poke fun at high school English class and SAT conventions. For example, Handler labels foreshadowing explicitly as such, and he includes vocabulary words and study questions at the end of some of Culp's diary entries. Also, Flan is performing Othello in a class, and this increasingly compares her life to that of the characters in the play.
Daniel Handler is a graduate of Lowell High School and The Basic Eight is supposedly loosely based on his high school experience. Many of the teachers portrayed in the book are thought to be based on (and have very similar names to) Lowell faculty members from Handler's high school years; some of these teachers continue to work at Lowell.
Handler's style of writing, along with the form of the story itself, loosely relate (although not directly) to Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita. The narrators are both incredibly unreliable, there is a highly stylized writing style, with frequently brilliant puns and wordplay.
The book's dark humor bears similarities to the 1988 black comedy film Heathers.
Handler also writes under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket.
