The Basic Eight

The Basic Eight
Author	Daniel Handler
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Fiction, Satire, Black Comedy
Publisher	Thomas Dunne Books
Publication date	April 1998
Pages	329 (1st edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-312-19833-7(1st edition)
OCLC Number	39756403

The Basic Eight is the debut novel by author Daniel Handler published in 1998. The book is full of sarcastic plot devices that poke fun at high school English classes and standardized testing. For example, Handler labels foreshadowing explicitly as such. In addition to creating a farce on high school English, he includes vocabulary words and study questions at the end of some of Culp's diary entries. During the school year in which the book takes place, Flan appears in the high school production Othello, and compares her life to that of the characters in the play.

Plot

Flannery Culp is a senior at Roewer High School in San Francisco. Over the course of the year, Flan records the events of her life in a diary - which, after some heavy editing by Flannery herself, some years after the fact, becomes the narrative. She and her seven close friends refer to themselves as "The Basic Eight"; they are an exclusive clique, hosting both an Opera appreciation club, and regular dinner parties, as they cope with the stresses of their final high school year. The plot begins in letters written by Flannery to her love interest, Adam, while on summer vacation, and reaches a dark conclusion in which lives of the members of the Basic Eight are turned upside down by revealed secrets, horrifying self-discoveries, and murder.

Origin

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. In addition, many of the locations used in the book, such as Lake Merced, are in their unedited forms and actually exist near Lowell High School.