Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
by Jane Austen (Author), Seth Grahame-Smith (Author)

From Bookmarks Magazine
It’s difficult to tell if critics’ reactions to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should be characterized as praise or astonishment. Some reviewers treated the book as a delightful gimmick. Others found that, beneath the surface, the book actually constituted an interesting way of looking at Austen’s novel. Zombies answer certain puzzling questions: Why were those troops stationed near Hertfordshire? Why did Charlotte Lucas actually marry Mr. Collins? (She had recently been bitten by zombies and wanted a husband who could be counted on to behead her—of course!) But critics also pointed out that this parody shows that Austen’s novel has remained so powerful over time that even the undead can’t spoil it.

I really wanted to be amused by this story. Alas, I was not. It was the Austen text with a paragraph here about zombies, a sentence there about fighting zombies. I would have much rather just read the Austen novel in its original form, truth be told. I did not finish the book. I kept waiting for the funny stuff to get there, but it just wasn't happening.


First read: June 2009