The Reptile Room

The Reptile Room is the second book in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, published in 1999.

The series is built on a repeated structure in which the Baudelaire children are placed with a new guardian and then threatened by Count Olaf, who is determined to obtain their inheritance. This volume follows their first encounter with him, and the title of the book is the name of the room that dominates its setting, which is where much of the action takes place before the arrangement collapses as the reader has been warned it will. The guardian this time is a herpetologist, Dr. Montgomery Montgomery, who takes the children in, gives each of them a room and a job in the hall where his snake collection is kept, and intends to take them with him to Peru to look for more.

The narrator is intrusive by design and tells the reader in advance that the story does not improve, which is the joke the series runs on, and the chapter titles and definitions of unusual words are part of the presentation rather than decoration. The books sit in the same market as other darkly comic children's series of the period, and this is the second of the thirteen volumes Snicket eventually wrote.