The Hostile Hospital

The Hostile Hospital

Author	Lemony Snicket (pen name of Daniel Handler)
Illustrator	Brett Helquist
Cover artist	Brett Helquist
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	A Series of Unfortunate Events
Genre	Gothic fiction Absurdist fiction Steampunk Mystery
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	September 2001
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	255
ISBN	0-06-175720-9
Preceded by	The Vile Village
Followed by	The Carnivorous Carnival

The Hostile Hospital is the eighth novel in the children's novel series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.

Plot

The book begins where The Vile Village left off, with the three Baudelaire orphans (Violet, Klaus, and Sunny) escaping the Village of Fowl Devotees. Soon, however, they encounter a general store called Last Chance General Store, and are kindly taken in by the shopkeeper (Milt), who lets them send a telegram to Mr. Poe. A man delivering newspapers (Lou) then arrives and gives The Daily Punctilio newspapers to Milt, who recognizes the picture of the three Baudelaires (credited as the murderers of Count Olaf) immediately. Both Milt and Lou pursue the children through the store and are about to catch them when a van suddenly pulls up, allowing the Baudelaires to jump in and escape.

Inside the van, the children meet a group of singers called the Volunteers Fighting Disease, who sing to sick people at Heimlich Hospital, which is divided in half, one side finished, one side unfinished, to lift their spirits. Since the volunteers never read The Daily Punctilio (they find it too depressing), the children decide it is safe to travel with them, and head to the hospital. Once they arrive, Babs (a voice on the intercom who is the Director of Human Resources) says that three volunteers are needed to work in the Library of Records. The children are eager to do the job as they wish to find the answers to the mysteries surrounding them, so they head to Babs' office, where they are given the job. Luckily, Babs does not even see them because she is a voice on a small intercom speaker (children should be seen and not heard, and by her logic, adults should be heard and not seen).

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 trick Hal to get the keys for the Library of Records room. Reviewing the notes of the Quagmires, they discover the existence of the Snicket File and successfully retrieve the thirteenth page from the Library of Records. On it there is a picture of their parents, Jacques Snicket, and another man whom they do not recognize. They learn that, due to the evidence discussed on page 9, experts suspect there may have been one survivor of the fire, but that possible survivor's whereabouts are unknown. At that moment, Esmé Squalor (Count Olaf's equally evil girlfriend) appears and starts kissing Olaf. 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 discover that Mattathias (Count Olaf) and his associates are going to perform a craniectomy on Violet, and locate 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 Mattathias is using anagrams for his false names (Al Funcoot, Flacutono and O. Lucafont, some previous names, being anagrams of Count Olaf), and try to find Laura V. Bleediotie (an anagram of Violet Baudelaire). Masquerading as Dr. Tocuna and Nurse Flo, Klaus and Sunny get into contact with the hook-handed man ("O. Lucafont") and the bald man ("Flacutono"), and find Violet lying unconscious on a hospital gurney, wearing an ugly surgical gown. 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 Esmé turns up with the real Dr. Tocuna and Nurse Flo, thus exposing them. With the group about to capture them, Klaus and Sunny escape on the gurney, while the unconscious Violet starts to wake up. After racing around the hospital looking for an escape, the siblings manage to trap Olaf's associate (the one who looks like neither a man nor a woman) in a closet. They decide to hide inside another closet, while the fire in the hospital spreads. They then jump out of the window using a rope of shirts that Violet improvised and hide in Count Olaf's trunk. Olaf gets in the car with his companions and drives away, the orphans still in the back.

Cultural references and literary allusions

Heimlich Hospital is a reference to Henry Heimlich, an American physician best known for the Heimlich Maneuver.
In an illustration, one of the Volunteers Fighting Disease plays a guitar with the inscription "This Volunteer fights disease". This is an allusion to Woody Guthrie, who inscribed "This machine kills fascists" on his instrument.
In an aside the narrator refers to his friend, Mr. Sirin, who is a lepidopterist. "Sirin" was an early pseudonym of Vladimir Nabokov, a famous Russian-American author and noted lepidopterist.
When Sunny sees the assistant of Count Olaf, who looks not like a woman nor man, she babbles "Orlando", which is a book by Virginia Woolf, about a man who has metamorphosed into a woman.
The patients at Heimlich Hospital present a wealth of allusions to famous literature, characters and authors:

Emma Bovary, a patient with food poisoning, refers to the character of the same name in Gustave Flaubert's novel, Madame Bovary.
Jonah Mapple, who suffers from seasickness, is named after Father Mapple, the preacher who sermonizes on the Biblical tale of Jonah trapped in a whale in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
Clarissa Dalloway is an allusion to a character of the same name in Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway. She suffers from no visible ailment, but stares sadly out the window, which could refer to both Woolf's struggles with depression and her essay, A Room of One's Own. Woolf is one of the most frequently-referenced authors in the series; previous allusions include the "Virginian Wolfsnake" in The Reptile Room and a passing reference to the Bloomsbury Set (of which Woolf was a prominent member) in The Miserable Mill.
Cynthia Vane, a patient with a toothache, is named after a character in Nabokov's short story, The Vane Sisters.
Charley Anderson comes from John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.
Dr. Bernard Rieux, whose ailment is a terrible cough, from Albert Camus's La Peste ("The Plague").
Two patients share names with actual authors: Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer and translator whose works include The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian novelist and playwright.

Translations

Brazilian Portuguese: "O Hospital Hostil", Cia. das Letras, 2003, ISBN 85-359-0451-4
Finnish: "Painajaisten parantola" (The Hospital of Nightmares), WSOY, 2004, ISBN 951-0-29451-9
Italian: "L'ostile ospedale", Salani, 2004, ISBN 978-88-8451-325-0
French: "Panique à la clinique" (Panic at the Hospital)
Greek: "Το Νοσηρό Νοσοκομείο"
Japanese: "敵意ある病院", Soshisha, 2004, ISBN 978-47-942-1363-1
Korean: "죽음의 병원" (The Hospital of Death), Munhakdongnae Publishing Co, Ltd., 2009, ISBN 978-89-546-0871-8
Russian: Кошмарная клиника (Nightmarish Clinic), Azbuka, 2005, ISBN 5-352-01227-1
Turkish : "Dehşet Hastanesi"

The Hostile Hospital

Plot

Cultural references and literary allusions

Translations

See also