Customer Reviews

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

5 star:		(167)
4 star:		(136)
3 star:		(86)
2 star:		(87)
1 star:		(112)

 

 

The literary community should never be too proud to laugh at itself. I own three copies of the original "Pride & Prejudice" plus all the movies, so my husband and I bought this the moment we spotted it on the shelf (and laughed all the way to the register).

Fans need to read this book tongue-in-cheek and prepare to laugh WITH it. If you don't like zombies or consider yourself a Jane Austen purist, if you admire only the most intricate writing and consider this sort of work irreverent, then you'll be appalled more than amused. The level of writing IS degenerated from the original but, considering the subject matter, I don't think "quality" was the forethought of the day. "Brains" is more like it.

On a literary note, the juxtaposition of familiar classic and farcical horror makes for harmless, laugh-out-loud comedy. I applaud this idea and hope the "Quirk Classics" line hammers out more spoofs on stories I love.

The only thing I find annoying is the last line of the blurb: "transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read." I'm perfectly capable of enjoying BOTH, thankyouverymuch.

... but...
1) It is an excellent mashup
2) It has freaking Zombies... I mean 'unmentionables'
3) I started reading it in the local store this afternoon and have wasted most of the afternoon reading it.
4) Did I mention the Zombies?

If you like 'Good Omens' you'll like this.
If you like 'Shaun of the Dead' you'll like this.
If you're literate you'll like this.
If you're a zombie you probably won't

I was an English major in college when I encountered Pride and Prejudice for the first time. I loved it--after a semester of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, it was nice to be reading a romance novel for a change.

But in the end I was unsatisfied. There were so many questions left unanswered: What could conceivably induce Chrlotte Lucas to marry the intolerable Mr. Collins? What were those soldiers even doing in that part of England when, at the time Austen was writing the book, she would have supposed them in Brussels, fighting Napoleon? How could Mr. Bingley's balls exact such excitement from an entire community? Now I have the answer: (Spoiler Alert) Zombies.

With the addition of Zombies, everything in Pride and Prejudice falls into place. Miss Lucas's marriage, Lady Catharine's widely held respect, even Elizabeth's remarkable self control and discipline makes more sense now that I know of her training in the orient.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies shows that occasionally due an excessive concern for popular sentiment or commerical appeal, an editor may be a trifle too liberal with the red pen. When I think of the generations who have been deprived of this edition, my only comfort is knowing that, with Miss Austen listed as primary author, librarians will now be shelving Pride and Prejudice and Zombies alongside the original redacted version.

Now that the Zombie barrier has been breached, I look forward to reading Of Mice and Men and Zombies, Being and Nothingness and Zombies, Crime and Punishment and Zombies, and War and Peace and Zombies, which, with the reinsertion of the Zombie scenes, will finally be a substantial read.

The concept was great - I thought - a kind of Buffy the VAmpire Slayer done with Elizabeth Bennett and all the smart and sassy conversation of Jane Austen in her wonderful outing, Pride and Prejudice. But it just didn't hit the mark.

The attempt to splice the two ideas together left me cold - it didn't blend together easily or nicely - and boy I wish it had - it would have been a pretty hilarious book if it had. Elizabeth Bennett would make a great 'unmentionable' slayer. She has the confidence, humour and sass to pull that off. But the book is brought down, in my opinion, by straying to far from the text and forgetting who the characters are and what they represent in the story. Mr Bennett as a trainer of his 5 girls in the pentacle of death just doesn't ring true. He really takes no interest in his children at all - let alone the training of them - and Lady Catherine de Bourgh as the trainer with Ninjas. Sorry. I know they were supposed to be ironic touches, but the writing of Jane Austen and Seth diverged too greatly to allow a continuity of theme between the two.

So - I don't begrudge anyone finding this funny. I don't know that Janeites would enjoy this - but I am looking forward too - and ever hopeful that some clever person in the future will achieve this novel - as it would be a real hoot.

How can you not want to read a book with this title? I've enjoyed Jane Austen, though I'm not one of her devotees, and I like zombies when they're handled well, though they've always fared better in films than in print. So such a mashup seemed promising. Unfortunately PPZ doesn't deliver. For a parody to work, the parody really has to read like the original, and the author's prose can't touch Austen's effortless, elegant, and, most of all, witty style. (Admittedly, there's a lot of actual Austen here, but it's always pretty obvious when the 21st century collaborator's voice enters.) And the depth of character that makes Austen such a great read is seriously damaged here. The first warning sign comes when Elizabeth seriously intends to cut Darcy's throat for insulting her, something which Austen's Elizabeth, zombie-killer or not, would never have considered. The zombie attacks are predictable and frequent, the interior illustrations are amateurish (though I suppose one shouldn't complain, since one never expects them), the new dialogue is bland rather than charming, and it's really a one-joke book. If your expectations are low, you may enjoy this, but personally I couldn't finish it, as all I found was more of the same as I went on. And for those of you who will chivvy me because of that, as you've done to other negative reviewers, let me just say that after I eat a bite, I don't have to finish the entire fish to know it's bad. I'll add a star for the delightfully grim cover -- if only the book itself delivered a fraction of its impact.

Never has so great an idea been so poorly executed. You could give the concept to any thirteen year old boy and he would probably come up with something better. It is like some publisher thought it up one evening and grabbed a Word document of Pride and Prejudice and went through very quickly adding the occaisional zombie reference. The first half of the book in particular is 95% Jane Austen with phrases like "but for the strange plague," "despite her warrior training," "wary of the sorry stricken," etc. pasted into the text.
There are exactly three jokes, which are quite funny the first time you read them but they wear thin when they are repeated every few pages:
1. There are zombies. The author inserts a zombie encounter, usually when Jane Austen has the characters travelling from one place to another. The fact that these are pasted into the original story stands out a mile - not because the original story had no zombies but because they are so badly done!
2. Elizabeth Bennet is a warrior with a short fuse. Jane Austen gave her sharp wit in response to the banal conversations of the day. This has been edited to imaginations of running her sword through the person talking. Ha ha.
3. There are a lot of balls (dances) in Pride and Prejudice. This leads to some innuendo, particularly between Elizabeth and Darcy. Very funny the first time, not so much the tenth.
The illustrations in this book are great. They are there to make you buy the book because the actual story is hastily and badly done. There are 11 illustrations, one for each part of the book that breaks away from Jane Austen's story into zombie territory. Save yourself some money and just thumb through the book looking at the pictures - there really isn't much else to this book other than what you can see in the illustrations.
Were Jane Austen around today, she may well be a zombie. Even though she would have all the physical and mental deficiencies of a zombie, and even though she is an author who knows nothing about zombies or slapstick undead horror, she could no doubt whip up a funnier zombie book than this one.

I want to like this book, but it's just... so... bad. The characters are bizarre, the world they live in is unbelievable and illogical, the zombies badly thought-out, the writing just atrocious. I really really wanted to like this book, and let me tell you I slog through some really bad books out of sheer stubbornness; the title and cover art should be enough to keep me going. But I just... can't.

Weird moments:
1) the Regency-era uber-polite Bennetts try to avoid talking about zombies so they call them "unmentionables" - but then they talk about them non-stop and 75% of the time call them zombies. It's like the author didn't quite have the writing discipline to enforce the kind of conversational discipline rife in the era. So, um, why did he even try?
2) The characters are just weird. Elizabeth is quite possibly a sociopath, and just very unevenly written.
3) People get "the strange plague" when bitten (ok, that's standard for zombies) but then also it seems like all old or new graves vomit out zombies whenever it rains enough to soften up the earth. It just doesn't make sense.
4) Grahame-Smith appears to have met women before, perhaps even watched us talk one or two times before... but oh it's painful watching him try to recreate it. The best he gets is women waiting till the door is closed to gossip viciously about the person leaving - which we totally do, but it's so clumsily written that it feels like finger painting as compared to Austen's scrupulously detailed oil painting.
5) The part that lost me: famed warrior Lady Catherine smugly invited her dinner guest Elizabeth (who she looked down on for training in China rather than Japan) to spar with her ninjas - oh yeah, ninjas are running all over Regency England, did I mention that part?? - and so Elizabeth does, blindfolded. Maybe spar means something different to people other than me - to me it doesn't mean inviting one's dinner guest to be killed in front of the other delicate guests. So the first ninja she disembowels and then chokes to death with his "lower bowels"; the second she deflects the throwing stars and throws one back at him, cuts of his hands and leg, then decapitates him. The last one she spears to a column with her katana, then reaches in and pulls out his heart (!) and frickin' EATS IT! WTF?? I'm totally lost, both in logic (wait, did Lady Catherine expect her 3 ninjas to kill her dinner guest in a sparring match??) and just grossed out. Aren't they all on the same side, trying to defend England against zombies??

I have no idea about any of the "romance", I got lost at page 132 with the heart-eating episode. Oh, but when Grahame-Smith tried to mimic Jane Austen's legendary wit and repartee, the best he could do was two - count them two! - clumsy double entendres on the word "balls". Yes, really. Sigh.

Why 2 stars instead of 1? Well, I liked the title (Pride and Prejudice... and Zombies!), it made me laugh; I thought the gruesome cover art was similarly funny in a terrible way. And the idea was so good, even if the execution was SO bad. So 2 stars, not just 1.

After suffering through Pride and Prejudice in a women's lit class in high school, being one of the three males in the class, and undergoing much embarrassment for my lack of understanding of the subject matter, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is bittersweet redemption. It was very nice while reading this to feel as though I am exacting revenge on Jane Austen's literary masterpiece by not only understanding the work but also enjoying a pseudo-perverse amalgamation of her work and a horror/comedy film.

No doubt some Austen fans will cry "heresy" at what Seth Grahame-Smith has done, that is take a classic piece of literature and splice in zombie references, but I think others will accept this work as the kind of flattery that it is to Ms. Austen. Others, like myself, who were intellectually incapable of understanding the works of Jane Austen, will feel sweet vindication from enjoying her great work with a smidgen of added immaturity.

There is no doubt that Grahame-Smith has accomplished something incredibly innovative with this work, possibly spawning a new literary-classic-remade-hilarious genre, and there is also no doubt that he has done so very well.

I recommend this book for anyone who enjoys comedy, zombies, and classic women's literature- and I never thought I would recommend anything on those terms.

The biggest concern for someone to purchase this edition is whether the quality of the book is worth spending more money than the cheap alternative. Well, it's solid brown boards(no dust jacket that can ruin the appearance of the book if even scuffed a little bit), numerous gold indentations, decorative black outlines, and wonderful painted pictures. If you like collecting pretty books, then this is exactly what is going to make you happy. Aside from not being made of leather, this book has all of the best features that a book can contain. If you want to spend money on the more expensive version because you want a beautiful book, then get this.

I was amused at some of the negative reactions to this work from Austen fans who resent that their favorite "romance" novel was treated so disrespectfully, and I was equally amused at some positive reviews from detractors of Austen who consider this a huge improvement. The book jacket itself encourages this latter response, with its snarky suggestion that this, unlike the original masterpiece, is readable.

As for those who hate Austen and prefer this adaptation, I am at a loss because about half the book IS word for word, paragraph for paragraph, even page for page copied from the uncopyrighted original! So I am bewildered by those who hate Austen but enjoyed this book -- they are probably oblivious to the fact that they are chuckling in large part at Austen's original work. In fact, I'd suggest that it takes an Austen fan to fully appreciate the book. For me, the greatest pleasure was reading familiar passages that are pure Austen, and then finding the author veer into some zombie or ninja tangent that oddly parallels the original work. Eg- the proposal scene's dialogue is basically identical to the original, but has Elizabeth and Darcy engaged in physical battle between verbal parries; ditto the Lady Catherine-Elizabeth confrontation at the end. Jane doesn't just catch cold on her trip to Netherfield; she is attacked and battered by zombies en route. Darcy doesn't buy Georgiana a new piano; he buys her zombie-fighting apparatus.

Secondly, P&P is not a Harlequin romance novel. It is satire. Austen ridicules the importance of manners, the impact of snobbery and elitism, the reduction of marriage to a state of prostitution by women like Charlotte who have no other means to support themselves. Austen's male characters treat the women with great delicacy and chivalry as they bargain for them like cattle; the women are genteel, demurely displaying their cultured accomplishments, while they battle each other ruthlessly and cattily for the attention of the most desirable bachelors; mothers desperately groom their daughters for marriage but inadvertently repel potential suitors by their maniacal and vulgar behaviors. Just as Austen is satirizing her environment and its values, the zombification of P&P satirizes both Austen and the zombie genre. I think Austen might have approved! Those who take Austen as a serious romantic, full of mush and optimism, won't like this book, but those who read Austen as subversive and cynical will find this to be a fun extension of the satire.

This adaptation isn't a complete success, and the author has a few flubs here and there. Lady Catherine couldn't possibly be in her 70s when her daughter is Darcy's age (28); Darcy wouldn't have inquired about Elizabeth's aunt and uncle in Pemberley, when he hadn't met them yet -- it was her parents he asked about. And occasionally I got the impression that the author, when abbreviating certain scenes, was relying more on Andrew Davies' screenplay for the A&E miniseries, rather than the book itself. Some reviewers took offense at some of the potty humor (one character becomes incontinent mid-story; there are other bad puns on "balls" and "fingering," the latter a deviation from Lady Catherine's reference to Elizabeth's piano skills), and while I enjoyed each tawdry joke the first time, the author did get a bit repetitive.

Overall, if you know and like P&P as fun, bitchy satire, and you have a good sense of humor, then you will likely appreciate this book as funny, light reading. If you are not a fan of Austen in the first place, or if you read Austen as serious romance not to be trifled with, then you will likely be put off.