Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I recently finished the cult hit, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (PPZ). It's the kind of book that everyone got excited to mention that it existed. Some people bought it, like my roommate, but, I believe, far fewer people actually read it. I, however, have foolishly embarked upon a long-term journey to read as many Jane Austen fan-fictions, re-imaginings, and modern adaptations as I can tolerate. I owe many a blog posting on those other works, but as you may imagine, PPZ offered a welcome relief as it avoided much of the feminine melodrama of this genre, and so it also makes for a more engaging blog post.

As a junior in high school, my Gifted English class was given a creative writing assignment in satire. Lacking any true creative impulse, I wrote "The Gospel According to Timothy Leary", in which the occurrences of the New Testament all make sense because the participants are high on LSD. I have no idea why my fairly religious, but Episcopalian, parents were so supportive of this, especially as it lacked any artistic merit. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies just seems to be a better piece turned in for the same assignment. I wonder if it began with using a word processor's Find and Replace function to insert 'zombie' for every occurrence of 'husband' or 'wife' and then rewriting the sentences to make sense.

And the narrative of PPZ does make a certain amount of sense. The military is needed to fight the zombie hordes. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is thought well of because of her fighting prowess (and her daughter is still to frail and sickly to to accomplish anything). Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins because she has contracted the zombie plague and knows she has little time left before she needs to be beheaded.

But some other aspects of the novel make unnecessary changes to the tale of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bennett is often too practical, training his daughters to fight zombies. He and the girls' aunt Mrs. Gardiner have extraneous extramarital affairs. Pemberley is a pagoda-styled building. And in the various discussions of balls by the many empty-headed young ladies, Elizabeth and Darcy share a titter in interpreting the word 'balls' to mean the male anatomy.

PPZ does take on a trend in modern literature: the omni-present reading group questions at the end of the book. Is it the goal of very book to be read by a book club now? Can members of book clubs not figure out discussion points on their own? In PPZ the questions are suitably tongue in cheek, my favorite of which is, "Does Mrs. Bennet have a single redeeming quality?" Apparently these questions are taken seriously in the Oprah Magazine.

And on the topic of zombies, a new film is to come out in the fantastic sub-genre: Nazi Zombies. The Norwegian film Dead Snow.