Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
by Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-SmithEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-04-04
ISBN: 1594743347
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Quirk Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9781594743344
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
Book Review: Poor Miss Jane
Summary: 1 Stars
Before we get started, let's acknowledge a point that has been made by other reviewers here. Messing around with classic literature is not a sin. Great artists have been doing that for centuries, including a guy named William Shakespeare just for openers, and it sometimes leads to excellent work - weighty or disposable, but excellent. Adding a supernatural horror plot to Jane Austen, though silly, is hardly a crime. It doesn't make for a very good book in this case, that's all.
The cleverest thing in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the section of study questions in the back. You know the kind of thing - some publishers include a set of questions in their bindings for classes or book clubs to discuss. I've never liked those things much, because they leave me with the feeling that someone thinks simply reading a book isn't good enough. Some of these particular questions can give you a laugh, though. One of them suggests that Jane Austen's publisher insisted on adding the zombie material to Pride and Prejudice to increase sales, and asks what the reader thinks the book would have been like without the zombies.
Cute. When the parody study question is the brightest thing about the book, the book must be pretty bad, but I don't have to tell you that, do I? I didn't think so.
I can think of several possible advantages to re-telling Pride and Prejudice as if Stephen King had written it. This book hints at such advantages; if the main characters are actual quasi-military undead-killers, it can throw their natural conflicts over marriage and money into high relief, for instance. And sure enough, the original novel's verbal disagreement between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy turns into a fistfight here. But so what? We already knew they had problems with each other - we don't need to see her break a mantelpiece with his face to understand that. The scene needs something more in order to work; I'm not sure what that something might be, but we don't get it here.
We don't get it anywhere else in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, either. With a few exceptions, these characters go through their paces just as they did in Pride and Prejudice, only stopping from time to time to disembowel a monster or two. Once in a while you get a genuine shift - one significant character catches the plague and gradually turns into a zombie, for instance, but all that really does is require another character to perform some actions that the character in question performed in the original novel. It doesn't make any difference in the long run, or in the short run, for that matter.
More importantly, I cannot for the life of me understand the additions in sexual innuendo or in bodily functions.
The Bennett sisters here, like many of their contemporaries, have undergone martial-arts training in the Far East, which in this case seems to include training in the arts of seduction for some reason. This doesn't fit in well with the original book's moral rules, and in the resulting confusion, some of the women in this book have affairs and others do not. All of them, though, crack wise regarding various gentlemen's "most English parts," and a few double-entendres on the subject of musket balls. And then some of the gentlemen come in for tremendous censure because they have sired a number of bastards. If this society allows its women that kind of sexual freedom, what else can anyone expect?
As for the bodily functions, for one thing, there's an awful lot of vomiting going on. I suppose I'd throw up from time to time if I were surrounded by the rotting corpses of the animated dead, but would these characters? They're living in a world where those corpses have been turning up regularly for 55 years - you'd think they'd get over their shock, even when (as happens here) some zombie eats something that emerges from its own body. I know, I know, this book is supposed to be a spoof, but is it too much to ask that a spoof include some internal consistency?
Then, too, one significant character ends up crippled, a punishment inflicted by another, but why render him incontinent too? Just to fling in remarks about how often he soils himself? What is this, junior high school?
And to top it all off, with all due respect, whoever commissioned these illustrations ought to have his eyes examined. It's hard enough to give this piece of work any of the seriousness due to even a parody - with these cartoons every few pages, that's next to impossible.
All right, folks, enough of picking this book apart. I mentioned Stephen King before, a man who has no qualms about including the grossest details in his work, not to mention lots of other stuff that would have made Jane Austen blush. (Well, maybe not her - she was pretty clear-eyed about most things - but certainly her contemporaries.) Still, King is a skillful writer and generally includes that kind of material when it makes sense and contributes to his story. Not here, I'm afraid.
I have no complaints at all about the fact that someone once got the idea to add zombies to Pride and Prejudice. I only wish that person had stopped right there.
Benshlomo says, Even some of the best ideas should remain in the realm of ideas.
More Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! reviews:
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Summary of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
?It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.?So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton?and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she?s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers?and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you?d actually want to read.
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