What’s BookieMonster Currently Reading? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Description:

‘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 as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Can she 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.

BookieMonster says:

Sometimes I want to read a piece of enjoyable fluffery. And nothing makes me happier than when that fluffery comes with a bit of brains (mmmm, BRAINS) and a side of chortles.

Pride and Prejudice. A classic of English literature, one that many people would include in their top books of all time (and that means a LOT when you consider how many books have been written) – including, probably, me. It’s also a damn fun book, which is why the stupid last line from the publisher’s blurb above annoys the bejebus out of me. But now – it has zombies!

And the zombies (woops, unmentionables) are just a whole lot of fun. Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters are transformed into Chinese Shaolin master trained zombie slayers but without losing their Austen sensibility. One of the best bits of this book is that it actually works so well – the domestic world Austen was portraying is so cut-throat it’s sometimes hard to know where the “new” parts begin and the “old” parts end.

The girly-swot student part of me also thinks part of the humour comes from the explicit “outing” of the underlying massive societal change that Austen has always been accused of ignoring – namely the devastating Napoleonic wars that England and Europe were involved in at the time of Pride and Prejudice – wars that required the countryside to be teeming with soliders that in the world of the book only seemed to be there to provide fun for the ladies.

I couldn’t read this whole book in one sitting – it is essentially a one-trick pony, but it’s enormously fun to have as a book to read before bed or in the bath and when you’re just not in the mood to think too hard about anything.

2½ furry little BookieMonster Kitteh paws up.

The business of Mr. bennett’s life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennett’s was to get them married.