Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

Contents

Following the tradition of Snicket's work, Horseradish has thirteen chapters, each with a certain theme. The book is prefaced with an introduction that outlines these themes.

Introduction

The bulk of the introduction follows the story of a man and a woman who live in a small grass hut in a village surrounded by a horseradish field. They generally live a routine life, and, as they have no taste for the horseradish, spend most of their time hunting to prepare raisin-stuffed snails to provide for their meals. One night, the woman asks her husband if there is more to life than doing the same thing for years. Her husband replies that the woman's mother once told him about a wise man who would probably know. The woman visits her mother, who says that she heard about the wise man from the woman's third grade teacher, Miss Matmos. Miss Matmos tells the woman that the wise man lives on the top of a mountain far away and that the journey to the top of the mountain is difficult and dull.

After months of walking and thinking about the subjects in the chapter headings, the woman arrives at the house of the wise old man; however, he is in fact not a wise man but a wide man. Tired and hungry, the woman returns home, but learns that in her absence her mother has taken her fishing pole, her husband has married Miss Matmos, and that she failed third grade. The moral of the story is that life has bitter truths that cannot be avoided.

Chapters

1. Home
2. Family
3. School
4. Work
5. Entertainment
6. Literature
7. Travel
8. Emotional Health
9. Affairs of the Heart
10. A Life of Mystery
11. The Mystery of Life
12. An Overall Feeling of Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape no Matter What One Does
13. Miscellaneous

Trivia

Flipping the pages in rapid succession shows the images of Lemony Snicket starting a walk, moving to a run, and tripping then falling.