Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith ~ A capsule review by Allen Kopp

Almost everybody will have heard of the classic English novel by Jane Austen called Pride and Prejudice, a piece of popular fiction from the early 19^th century that has stood the test of time and has endured for generations. It tells the genteel story of the Bennett sisters (there are five of them, complete with a garrulous mother and a put-upon father with a dry wit) and their modest and all-very-proper flirtations in the class-conscious England of the 1820s. Those who haven’t read the novel or been otherwise exposed to it in school have probably seen at least one of the many film adaptations that have come out over the years, the most recent being in 2005.

In the recent novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the writer Seth Grahame-Smith takes the Jane Austen classic one step further. The England of the Bennett sisters has been transformed into a place where zombies rise from their graves to feed on the living. Elizabeth Bennett, the principal of the Bennett sisters, is an intrepid zombie killer. She is determined to wipe out the zombie menace—but soon she is thrown off-course by the pursuit of love. What follows is a comedy of manners, complete with romance, flesh-eating, decapitations, open sores, decaying corpses, witty repartee, and plenty of “ultraviolent zombie mayhem.”

Call it a bastardization of a classic, if you will, or a clever take-off or an ingenious mix of two divergent worlds. If you are a reader and if you enjoy the weird, the bizarre and the offbeat, you are almost sure to relish the experience of reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Copyright © 2011 by Allen Kopp