This is a bit more formal than I usually write here, it's also focused at horror fans, which I must admit I'm not really one of. So this is a bit outside the areas of my expertise.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.“ So begins Seth Grahame-Smith mashup of Zombies with one of the masterpiece of Regency Romance, Pride and Prejudice. For many of you the title, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, will be all the review you need.
The prose retains Austen’s text, with Mr. Grahame-Smith adding, deleting, and modifying as he goes. The mother is still daft, the father is still aloof but lovable, and the sisters Bennet are still, to varying degrees, as in chase of husbands as they were originally. The effect of the additions is to create a more dystopian Britain, far more brutal than the one Austen portrays, as befits a zombie tale.
The zombies have infested England for over a half century preceding the events of the novel and are the deadly but frail shambling sort, capable of spreading their infection mainly through bites. The best of Victorian-era science is still at a loss for how to cure the afflicted, which are called Unmentionables in the polite society of the novel.
The only other real modification to the backstory of the novel is that The Bennet sisters were taken to China by their father at a young age in order to study defense against the Unmentionables under a Shaolin monk. The main characters, despite the warrior ethos now infusing and distopia the novel, feel little different from in the original. It’s addition is most noticeable in the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, who in one scene dispatches three ninjas and in another comes very close to beheading Mr. Darcy. She is, basically, Elizabeth, Vamp—, er, Zombie Slayer. Which, given Elizabeth’s sharp tongue, isn’t that much of a leap and does add a bit more of a modern feminist vibe to the story.
With this kind of a transmogrification the question is what exactly is accomplished by the change? The addition of zombies does not disrupt the emotional core of the book — it’s still a boy meets girl, girl dislikes boy, finds out boy is in love with her, is greatly offended by boy on many levels, boy does damage control, and girl is eventually won over by boy kind of story. There are Ninjas and undead walking around, but the additions do not much change the plot.
As Mr. Grahame-Smith does not go the Clueless route of a more radical rewrite, the main effect of the translation from a pastoral England to a zombie-infested one is to make physical the fights between the characters (Clueless being the movie starring Alicia Silverstone which translated the plot of Emma to mid-ninties Los Angeles). Where previously battles of wit sufficed now only steel does, and it’s not really an improvement in terms of the story.
If you like zombies, ninjas, Public Domain mashups, and sanguinary love stories, it’s pretty much required reading. Or viewing, as a movie based on the mashup is about as inevitable as Fox screwing Joss Wheadon.
