Phillyist Reviews... Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I mentioned Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in Whiz a while back, and the publisher of the book, a Philadelphia company called Quirk Books, was good enough to send me an early review copy. Unfortunately, just as the book arrived in the mail, the Philadelphia Film Festival was starting, so I didn't have time to read it until recently. The book has since been officially released, and been purchased in large numbers; it quickly became a New York Times Best Seller, and is currently sold out on Amazon and on the Quirk Books website. Zombies are definitely popular these days! Also, the book is rather unique. It's not a complete reimagining of Jane Austen's classic romance novel Pride and Prejudice; it is Pride and Prejudice, just with zombies added.

In co-author Seth Grahame-Smith's alternate history England, the kingdom has been overrun by a "strange plague" of "unmentionables," and constant military action is required to hold back the monsters. It's a rather cruel and dangerous world; a simple walk down a country lane can lead to a deadly encounter with brain-eating beasts who were once your best friends. As a consequence of this, many British citizens have been trained as warriors since they were children, often in China or Japan by martial arts masters, and thus follow a brutal and harsh warrior code which can require violence being done to themselves or to others should honor be impugned (almost as if they were all Klingons). Mr. Bennet has even seen fit to bring up his five daughters this way. This means that woven into the original text are constant references to zombies, fighting, and honor. It gives the book a tinge of the surreal, as characters can one moment be quietly avoiding speaking of their feelings in a drawing room, and the next moment be down the road swiping the heads off zombies with a katana, or out in the backyard assassinating ninjas, or upstairs giving themselves the five cuts of shame because of something embarrassing they've done. Grahame-Smith doesn't take any of it too seriously, either; he's managed to inject a lot of dark, gross-out, and lowbrow humor in the form of double entendres (balls are a favorite subject), references to vomit (there's really quite a lot of vomit in this book), and gruesome descriptions of zombie attacks and transformations.

The only thing I find disappointing about the novel is that it sometimes seems to lack the courage of its convictions. Having established Britain's warrior culture, Grahame-Smith constantly has the characters threaten to do extravagantly violent things to each other, but then very rarely has them follow through on any of their threats. And it's not because it wouldn't make sense for them to do so in the context, but more often because it would change the story too much for Grahame-Smith to allow it to happen. So he has to come up with some pretext for things to happen the same way they did in the original book, with varying success. For instance, it makes perfect sense that Elizabeth's argument with Darcy about halfway through the book should become a duel to the death in this version of the story, and this change makes the sequence extra entertaining, as it's now full of action and humor. But it makes less sense that no one would die at the end of the duel. It also makes little sense when, during the sequence where Lydia is abducted by Mr. Whickam, the new warrior-women versions of Elizabeth and Jane, despite the fact that their sister and their family's honor are both in terrible danger, choose to simply wait at home for the menfolk to take care of everything.

Admittedly, there are some pretty deep changes, such as the inspired idea of having Elizabeth's friend Charlotte Lucas become infected with the strange plague and slowly transform into a zombie. The fact that none of the other characters except Elizabeth seem to realize what's happening is another instance of Grahame-Smith trying to avoid wholesale changes to the original text, but in this case it feels less clumsy and added on, and more surreal and satirically funny.

It's an odd idea for a book—taking a classic novel and adding a new element to it that gives the whole thing a different flavor and tone. I still can't decide how I feel about it exactly. I certainly enjoyed the book and found it entertaining, but I enjoyed it less for the new action sequences and dark comedy, and more for the romance that was already at the heart of the original story. In other words, I was reading more to see Elizabeth and Darcy get together again than I was to see how many zombies they would kill in the process.

That being said, I did enjoy the zombie-killing bits, and I think the book is a unique creation that's worth a read, especially if you're a fan of undead literature. It would help if you were also a fan of the original book, or at least knew the story reasonably well, as a lot of the comedy and cleverness of this novel comes out of the odd tweaks Grahame-Smith has made to Austen's text. Fans of Jane Austen and fans of zombies might not often be able to come together and agree on things, but this is a book I think they both can enjoy.

Image via Quirk Books