Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith & Jane Austen

The title says it all. Jane Austen’s classic tale of Pride & Prejudice with zombie mayhem interspersed. Lizzie and her sisters are martial arts masters and zombie-killing machines who must rid Meryton of the “sorry stricken” and, sigh, find themselves husbands to love…

Author: Seth Grahame-Smith & Jane Austen

Pages: 317

Published: 2009

Bottom Line: Read for the novelty. If you’re a true fan of Pride & Prejudice it’ll just make you want to pick up your old, dog-eared copy of the original and read it right.

I’m afraid that, despite my oft-mentioned love of all things Jane Austen and zombies, this book simply didn’t do it for me. I didn’t find it terribly clever or funny, and the zombie bits written by Seth Grahame-Smith just didn’t quite gel with Jane Austen’s lovely, witty prose. Now I am not a humourless old bat and I really had high hopes for this being a fun, silly mashup but, for me, it didn’t deliver.

If you’ve ever read Pride & Prejudice before it’s completely unnecessary to read the entire book. Just read the zombie chapters and look at the lovely, zombiefied illustration and you’ll get all that the book has to offer.

The gist: Same story, same characters. There’s a zombie plague in Meryton. Lizzie Bennet and her sisters were trained by a martial arts master in China, and so have the battle skills necessary to slaughter said zombies. Needless to say, there’s zombie killing, zombie bites, zombie transformations, and some good, old-fashioned romancin’ (non-zombie).

Honestly, while I was reading this book, the only thing I could think about was how much I wanted to reread the original. It felt almost improper to be reading this bastardization of a classic text. Grahame-Smith’s writing and dialogue simply isn’t good enough to fit in seamlessly with Austen’s, and his chapters feel like they were written by a bored young boy desperate to jazz up a required reading.

Moreover, the zombie storyline was just too goofy to be taken seriously. Perhaps I could swallow zombies in Meryton, but not zombies and martial arts masters and ninjas and God knows what else.

Needless to say, if you love Austen you may just want to give this one a pass. Why not reread Pride & Prejudice and integrate your own zombie mashup? I’m sure it couldn’t be any worse than this one.

I’m not even going to try to read Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters, though the cover is absolutely hilarious.