Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Review by Lisa Fary

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains will be in want of more brains.”

I really wanted to hate this book.

After all, Seth Grahame-Smith didn’t do much. He took Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and re-wrote some scenes to include zombies and added ninja skills to Mr. Darcy’s impossible list of feminine accomplishments.

But, that first line made me giggle and from there, it got harder and harder to force myself to hate Pride and Prejudice and Zombies just by virtue of its existence and lineage. That kind of attitude belonged to Caroline Bingley or Lady Catherine de Bourgh; I prefer to have a more open mind, like Elizabeth Bennet,

Grahame-Smith’s P&P revision takes place in a zombie plague ridden England, where manners dictate that zombies are called “unmentionables” or the “sad stricken”. The Bennet girls have trained with Shaolin monks in China, while Mr. Darcy and Lady Catherine have trained in Japan. Otherwise, the mood is quite a lot like “Masque of the Red Death”: the wealthy continue to live in their insulated world of parties, drawing room conversation, and needlepoint while horrors rage just outside the window.

It’s a clever curiosity, good as a conversation starter at the laundromat, on the train, or at the movie theater while waiting for the lights to go down. Keep it visible on your bookshelf for when you have guests; invariably, someone will have a strong opinion on it or will have no knowledge of its existence, ensuring an ice breaker.

In the end, I didn’t hate Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but didn’t love it either. The novelty doesn’t hold up for the length of the book. It would have been more enjoyable in shorter chunks, maybe as a serial or even as a comic book. As a novel, it gets tedious.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is available at Amazon.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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