Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

As most people are by now aware, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic that adds a plague of zombies to the book’s setting and plot.

I have to say that while I was looking forward to the book, its execution left me wanting.  The zombie storyline feels like a veneer laid over the original storyline in a way that doesn’t really add much to that original story.  I feel like the zombies are just a gimmick that don’t hold up for an entire book.  Pretty much the only thing that kept me reading was my love for the original story, which remains mostly unchanged beneath the zombie veneer.

Seth Grahame-Smith has recharacterized several of the people, mostly making them more violent and bloodthirsty—Elizabeth is a Chinese-trained “master of the deadly arts”, and Lady Catherine is a noted zombie slayer with an entourage of ninjas—but everyone takes pretty much the same actions and ends up in the same places.  At least one character becomes a zombie and is killed, but not until after her presence in the original plot is finished.  I think this sameness is what led me not to really engage with Grahame-Smith’s additions: the original was a deliciously sarcastic commentary on 19th century people of wealth layered in with a genuinely compelling story of the development of characters’ personal relationships¹.  The zombie additions don’t change the story enough to make a statement of their own, but they do serve to obscure some of the themes and characterizations of the original, so their presence is a net negative.

All in all, I probably would have been better off just reading Pride and Prejudice again.