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charameiI've never read any Austen, either.
Oh, I've tried. But romances bore me to tears, Victorian purple-prose romances even more so. The characters often seem one-dimensional and the plots formulaic. You know what Victorian romances need? They need something with a bit of bite. Something exciting. Something to break up the plot from the monotony of teenage whining and hormone-driven angst.
They need... zombies.
There's not much that can be said about P&P&Z; my reaction is still closer to 'it's Pride and Prejudice WITH ZOMBIES!!!11' than anything truly useful. And it doesn't help that, having never before made it through an Austen novel, I'm also having the urge to review Pride and Prejudice without Zombies.
I have a fundamental dislike of the Victorian prose style. About the only Victorian stories I can make it through without getting bored are Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (and then I usually skip to the last two chapters, since that's where all the good stuff is) and Sherlock Holmes, because the plots in Holmes move too fast to get bogged down like a lot of other Victorian novelists do (who decided it was a good idea to pay Dickens by the word?). When the plot is also dull - as in Austen - I generally give up very quickly indeed.
I actually finished P&P&Z. I didn't finish it quickly, and I did on several occasions stop and look at the spine to work out how much longer I had to go; but I finished it. And one thing I found notable was that, when there had been no mentions of zombies for a couple of pages, that was when my attention flagged the fastest.
Changes from the original as I know it from films are: the zombies, of course. Several of the less pleasant characters meet grisly ends; Wickham has a particularly delicious fate. Mrs Bennet, alas, survives.
Lizzie's warrior nature is played up very well, and one scene with Darcy in particular is much more satisfying when she beats him up than when she simply yells at him. Better still, the worldbuilding exists; we hear frequent tales of cities having fallen to the hordes, London is a fortress divided into sections, and travel is made distinctly harder by the presence of unmentionables on the roads.
The last page of the book is a mock-up of those 'educational supplement' things they stick in the backs of classic editions for schools. It is probably the funniest part of the book, which is saying something.
But mostly? It's Pride and Prejudice. With zombies. Of course it's good!
Roll on Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, that's what I say.
Oh, I've tried. But romances bore me to tears, Victorian purple-prose romances even more so. The characters often seem one-dimensional and the plots formulaic. You know what Victorian romances need? They need something with a bit of bite. Something exciting. Something to break up the plot from the monotony of teenage whining and hormone-driven angst.
They need... zombies.
There's not much that can be said about P&P&Z; my reaction is still closer to 'it's Pride and Prejudice WITH ZOMBIES!!!11' than anything truly useful. And it doesn't help that, having never before made it through an Austen novel, I'm also having the urge to review Pride and Prejudice without Zombies.
I have a fundamental dislike of the Victorian prose style. About the only Victorian stories I can make it through without getting bored are Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (and then I usually skip to the last two chapters, since that's where all the good stuff is) and Sherlock Holmes, because the plots in Holmes move too fast to get bogged down like a lot of other Victorian novelists do (who decided it was a good idea to pay Dickens by the word?). When the plot is also dull - as in Austen - I generally give up very quickly indeed.
I actually finished P&P&Z. I didn't finish it quickly, and I did on several occasions stop and look at the spine to work out how much longer I had to go; but I finished it. And one thing I found notable was that, when there had been no mentions of zombies for a couple of pages, that was when my attention flagged the fastest.
Changes from the original as I know it from films are: the zombies, of course. Several of the less pleasant characters meet grisly ends; Wickham has a particularly delicious fate. Mrs Bennet, alas, survives.
Lizzie's warrior nature is played up very well, and one scene with Darcy in particular is much more satisfying when she beats him up than when she simply yells at him. Better still, the worldbuilding exists; we hear frequent tales of cities having fallen to the hordes, London is a fortress divided into sections, and travel is made distinctly harder by the presence of unmentionables on the roads.
The last page of the book is a mock-up of those 'educational supplement' things they stick in the backs of classic editions for schools. It is probably the funniest part of the book, which is saying something.
But mostly? It's Pride and Prejudice. With zombies. Of course it's good!
Roll on Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, that's what I say.