Zombies? Let Austen flesh it out

What is it about Jane Austen? Her works have inspired unauthorised biographies,cookbooks,television miniseries,book clubs,a book about a Jane Austen book club,and a movie about the book about the Jane Austen book club. And now,having exhausted every Austen story line humanely possible,authors and screenwriters are turning to what is inhumanely possible.
The glowing reviews of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies prove the public will accept anything in the Jane Austen spinoff genre. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” The first half of that line is Austen’s; the second half is California author Seth Grahame-Smith’s. That’s pretty much how the whole book reads: The Bennet sisters are minding their own business when all of a sudden reanimated human corpses stagger into the setting.

Consider the famous ball scene,in which Elizabeth first meets the haughty Mr Darcy. Darcy says rude things,Jane and Mr Bingley dance,and then,“Unmentionables poured in,their movements clumsy yet swift,their burial clothing in a range of untidiness. Their flesh was in various states of putrefaction…”

“There are so many things in the original suited to make it into a horror,” Grahame-Smith insists. His book is 80 per cent original Austen text—he’s simply woven a complementary monster storyline into the existing romance.

In Pride and Predator,Austen’s beloved characters are terrorised by a ruthless alien who lands on Regency-era Earth,then begins mass slaughter. Austen herself becomes the monster in Jane Bites Back,a novel by Michael Thomas Ford to be published in 2010. In it,Austen is a frustrated vampire and bookstore owner. “She’s been middle-aged for 200 years,which is not making her happy,” Ford says. “We’ve been calling it ‘Bridget Jones meets Dracula’.”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,impossibly,works—in part because of story lines like the one developed for Charlotte Lucas. In Austen’s book,Lucas is a pragmatic soul who marries for financial security. In Grahame-Smith’s book,Lucas gradually transforms into a zombie. For a Jane Austen fan,the gratifying aspect of reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is not the comic bloodthirsty additions,but rather how they highlight the humour that already exists in the original Pride and Prejudice. Austen was funny—something that’s easy to miss if you get too caught up in the romance and cravats. Reading Zombies means discovering that half of the things you’re laughing about were written 200 years ago by Austen herself.
_Monica Hesse,LATWP