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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, #1)

Seth Grahame-Smith

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Jan 14, 2025 Werner marked it as started-and-not-finished · review of another edition

As always with books I didn't finish, this isn't a full-scale review (and I didn't assign a star rating), just an explanatory note for why I didn't finish. Not being at all a fan of the whole zombie-apocalypse trope, I wasn't really the target audience for this one. But I am an Austen fan, and an admirer of action-oriented heroines. When my colleague at the BU library suggested featuring this book as part of an Austen-themed program later this year for the book club the library sponsors, I thoug As always with books I didn't finish, this isn't a full-scale review (and I didn't assign a star rating), just an explanatory note for why I didn't finish. Not being at all a fan of the whole zombie-apocalypse trope, I wasn't really the target audience for this one. But I am an Austen fan, and an admirer of action-oriented heroines. When my colleague at the BU library suggested featuring this book as part of an Austen-themed program later this year for the book club the library sponsors, I thought I should read it so as to be able to contribute to that discussion. I approached the read with an open mind, hoping to like it to some degree, or at least to find it "okay." Sadly, however, though I stuck with it for three days and into the 30th chapter (of 61), my experience doesn't permit me to be that positive.

Of course, this is the book that pioneered the concept of the literary "mash-up," taking a work in one genre (usually a classic in the public domain) and re-imagining it as a story type of an altogether different sort. In principle, I don't have a problem with that concept --and might even try another example sometime, in the hope of finding one that's better conceived and executed (and indeed, this one is so bad on both counts that it's hard to imagine that any other example could be anything but better!). But to do justice to the concept, the writer would need to make the character portrayals faithful to the original ones, just as is the case with spin-offs or pastiches (if they're well done); the re-invented characters would need to have the same personalities as their originals, but in different circumstances.

Suffice it to say that this is not (to put it mildly) the case here! While both Lizzy and Darcy retain some surface similarity to their originals, their core personalities and values are drastically changed (much for the worse), to the point that they're unrecognizable. Grahame-Smith's Lizzy is not an "action heroine," but a grotesque and repulsive caricature of one; and the book cannot be characterized as a re-imagining of, or a "homage" to Pride and Prejudice, but rather only as a very poor parody of it. (And this is the assessment of a reader who enjoyed the short film Plots and Proposals, https://www.goodreads.com/videos/3443... , not of one who's incapable of laughing at a well-done parody.) Moreover, the treatment here reduces the plot to a cartoon, to the point that "suspension of disbelief" is impossible. A favorable review exhorts us not to "take it too seriously." Indeed, it's impossible to "take seriously" (on several levels!), but it's not humorous; it's ludicrous, which isn't the same thing, and not helped by wallowing in vicarious sadism and throwing in double entendres. I couldn't bring myself to waste more time on it. ...more

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