Let me start off by admitting that I love both Zombies and Regency novels. So, naturally, when I saw a zombified portrait of Jane Austen on the cover of a book, I was intrigued. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a parody (or as the back cover describes it, “an expanded edition”) of Jane Austin’s classic regency novel Pride and Prejudice.
The book itself is set up like the Austen books before it, and the first thing you see is the page with the illustration information, including their captions. If reading those doesn’t make you want to dive into the book, I don’t know what will.
Moving through the first few pages, I was reminded of the practice of replacing random words with the word “pants”. References to the “deadly arts” that the Bennett girls are trained in, and the way phrases are replaced with things to do with zombies, stilt the flow of the book. These things seem superfluous, and I began to wonder what the point of anyone changing anything was.
However, once I was a few chapters in, I knew what the point was. Suddenly, things that had seemed odd or unreasonable in the original book made sense in the strangest and funniest way. Zombies made finding a husband to protect you a rather reasonable thing. This is shown particularly in the case of Charlotte Lucas, who marries for quite a different reason than was explained in Pride and Prejudice; the newer reason actually makes more sense.
Throughout this tongue-in-cheek re-working of the original, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies will make you laugh, cry, and raise your eyebrows in confusion. If you are a die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool Austen purist, this book may not be for you. If you do, however, love satire, zombies, and Pride and Prejudice, you will probably wonder why it took you so long to pick up this book and find out what Mr. Darcy would look like delivering a roundhouse kick to an “unmentionable”.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Publisher: Quirk Books; Later Printing edition (April 4, 2009)
ISBN-10: 1594743347
ISBN-13: 978-1594743344
Genre: Parody/Horror
