Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Haven't updated for a while and am too sleepy to compose an epic blog post. So, as I finally got my marks back for my Contemporary Literature module today, here is my almost-a-first (it got 69, I needed 70) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies review. Shame it's only worth 20%!
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice has a major significance within Western culture. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does exactly what it says on the tin, a literary ‘mashup’ of Austen’s classic and a horror plot.

It’s one of those ideas that’s so simple, it’s amazing nobody’s ever thought of it before. Seth Grahame-Smith brings Austen’s heroines literally kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. The simplicity is what makes it effective. The title alone raises a smile, and the humour of Austen’s staid and somewhat repressed characters suddenly having to fight off zombie hordes works brilliantly in its bizarre juxtaposition.

Grahame-Smith turns the class tension between Lady de Bourgh and the Bennets into a believable snobbery on the former’s behalf over the suitability of the Bennets’ Chinese rather than Japanese martial training. Developing the sisters into highly skilled warriors also gives the women some agency, which most of Austen’s heroines traditionally seem to lack. Elizabeth et al. actually have something to do other than worry about how soon they’ll be married off.

However, the joke soon wears thin. While the conceit would work well as a short story or perhaps on a sketch show, the novel drags considerably. By directly interacting with Austen’s original text, Grahame-Smith shows himself to be an inferior writer – I often found myself longing to reread the original novel free from Grahame-Smith’s scatological obsessions. At times the humour veers towards to the puerile, though as the target audience for zombie novels is teenage boys, this is perhaps not surprising.

The novel felt very rushed. Admittedly zombies in Pride and Prejudice is in itself an Americanisation, but the humour here is supposed to come directly from this unusual splicing of genres. Scenes such as the Bennet sisters wandering through the English countryside, encountering skunks and racoons are jarring. It seemed as if Grahame-Smith had done very little research into Regency England. This is regrettable, as the novel’s central conceit is effective. Had Grahame-Smith’s input been written in a way that better emulated the style of Austen, it could have been funnier. Lizzie and Mr. Darcy making crude innuendo to one another is one of many incidents that seem decidedly out of character. What’s so frustrating is that the idea had the potential to become a brilliant novel, and falls short due to sloppy writing.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was an instant bestseller, and its influence is already being seen. In the eight months since its publication, we have been greeted with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Mr Darcy, Vampyre. As a joke that only (barely) works once – due to its originality, it’s hard to see what these homages will bring to the literary world. As its eponymous monsters, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seems to have unleashed an unstoppable terror upon us.

Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Quirk: Philadelphia, April 2009, 320 pages, £8.99.