Book Review: Pride And Prejudice And Zombies

Some things just make obviously good combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, RPG mechanics in shooters, and twisty mountain roads and motorcycles all come to mind. Other combinations are less obvious, but still great when discovered. Peanut butter on hamburgers, and rogue-lite mechanics in shooters come to mind here. A further addition would be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the unique mash-up of Jane Austen’s classic romance novel into a world filled with zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. It shouldn’t work at all, but it does.

Given that the book came out in 2009 and already saw a big-screen adaptation in 2016, I’m hardly an early discoverer of this novel. In fact, the book has been sitting in my “To Read” list on Goodreads for at several years, which really just shows how long it takes for something to bubble up to the top of the list. Or something. My reading backlog is only slightly more manageable than my gaming backlog.

At any rate, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for those unfamiliar with the story, re-imagines the Bennet sisters as trained zombie hunters, defending their little part of England from the shambling menace which has come to threaten all of England. The other characters have been similarly re-imagined, all while keeping their essential characteristics that made the original book such a classic.

In a lot of ways this book is the most well done version of the old Jr. High-school boy routine of re-imagining some boring piece of historical literature to involve more action in some form or another. 

Romeo and Juliet with automatic weapons (okay, that’s one’s been done), or modern day Macbeth (wait, that’s been done too!) All right, let’s just call Pride and Prejudice and Zombies another entry in a long line of remixing the classics.

The point is, it works. The original gist of Austen’s classic story is still there, just with the addition of zombies which the book very properly never names a such, preferring such properly British euphemisms as “Manky Dreadfuls” and “Shambling Menace.” There’s also a particularly well done sword fight between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine which would have been perfectly at home in a piece of Chinese cinema such as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

I can’t speak to the quality (or lack thereof) of the resulting movie adaptation, having not seen it. I expect that, as usual, the book is better than the movie. For the book, at least, I’ll have no qualms handing it to my teenage sons in a few years, if a straight dose of Regency Romance isn’t to their tastes.