Pride and Prejudice … and Zombies?

Lizzie's hungering for more than Darcy's wet shirt

Barry Trotter, Android Karenina, Alice in Zombieland, Wuthering Bites, Twilite, Jane Slayre, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After. Sound oddly familiar? These are just some of the titles of bestsellers, both new and old, that have been given a fictional mash-up.

For every bestseller published, there seems to be a queue of follow-up parodies. A new ‘mash-up’ genre defines fiction that integrates vampire or zombie subplots with the original texts. The genre was first popularised in 2009, after publisher Quirk Books’ quirky take on a Jane Austen classic. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has now sold over a million copies; a figure that stands as a testament to its appeal. This has inspired a brace of books with the addition of ‘and vampires’ or ‘and zombies’ in their titles. Now, zombies can shuffle around your favourite fictions, eating brains or bashfully dropping bits of themselves onto Mr Darcy’s carpet. Other newcomers superimposed into books include figures with extraordinary dental hygiene, baring their pearly-whites from dark corners. But how have the undead invaded the classics, and why are they making me shudder for all the wrong reasons?

The deafening tagline to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies shouts ‘the Classic Regency Romance - now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!’ This is the brainchild of writer Seth Grahame-Smith, who saw the novel as ‘ripe for gore and senseless violence.’ An estimated 85 percent of Austen’s original novel has been retained, whilst a visceral zombie subplot as been added to the remainder. The book’s first sentence now reads ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.’ For the benefit of polite society, these zombies are tactfully referred to as ‘unmentionables’ or ‘manky dreadfuls.’

Elsewhere in Zombieland, Alice tumbles down an open grave, following the Black Rat to a nightmare of skeletal grinning cats and insanity. But that’s not the only thing troubling Alice. Her skin is putrefying; her hair is falling out. And she has the horrifying feeling that she may never be able to leave Zombieland. In Ben Winter’s futuristic Android Karenina, Tolstoy’s narrative is undercut by androids, cyborgs and robots that threaten revolution. Jane Slayre, with a name that rhymes painfully with its original title, faces a vampiric family of Reeds, zombie classmates, and the quintessential werewolf in the attic. Wuthering Bites’s Heathcliff is half-vampire, half-vampire slayer due to some complicated parentage. And between the hungry work of fending off monsters and his stormy passion for Cathy, he finds himself becoming a little bit peckish…

Mash-up books promise to be creepy, innovative, tongue-in-cheek and subversive. They create a literary niche that taps into the contemporary compulsion for horror and fears of contamination. But zombified books can seem as parasitic as the creatures they contain. Blazoned across the cover of the mashed-up Pride and Prejudice is the line ‘by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.’ For American publisher Quirk Books, all books copyrighted before 1923 are now in the public domain. Cashing in now that copyright protection has expired, the ever-increasing number of spoofs look to be becoming lazier gimmicks and money-makers that hijack already well-established books.

The original mash-up of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which is now set to become a blockbuster, proved hugely popular. But this has inspired books that lack creativity and individuality, and that seem to be as brain-dead as the new characters they contain. I’m unsure whether mash-up books want to be read as spoofs and imitations, or whether they aspire to be read as new novels in their own right. Ultimately, like the zombies themselves, the mash-up genre has an equally short lifespan.

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