Over the past year we've talked plenty about the idea of "re-telling" stories, in the manner of Chaucer or Boccaccio or Irving. An American writer by the name of Seth Grahame-Smith recently teamed up with the long-dead Jane Austen to produce a hybrid novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That's right, Grahame-Smith took Austen's work and grafted his own zombie novel onto it, producing some very, er, interesting results.
Apparently the Austen-hybrid fad has caught on. A new novel -- this one by Ben Winters -- is due out on September 15: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. The New York Times reports:
Like some monster stitched together in a mad scientist’s laboratory, another Jane Austen novel is about to be grafted to a classic horror milieu in hopes of creating a best seller. Publishers Weekly reported that Quirk Books would follow its unexpected hit “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” with a new title, “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,” to be published on Sept. 15. “Zombies,” written by Seth Grahame-Smith, combined about 85 percent of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” text with a tale of undead flesh eaters. The new book, to be written by Ben H. Winters, will find the Dashwood sisters tossed from their home and sent to an island of man-eating sea creatures. Jason Rekulak, a Quirk Books editor, told Publishers Weekly that the book would take inspiration from everything from “Jules Verne novels to ‘Lost’ to ‘Jaws’ to ‘Spongebob SquarePants.’ ” Mr. Grahame-Smith, meanwhile, signed a two-book deal with Grand Central Press that includes a new book called “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”You may want to check out the dramatic trailer for the book.
I'll have to check into that! Sounds veeeeery interesting!
ReplyDeletethe video is super strange!
ReplyDeleteI'm currently reading "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", and I thibk that it is pretty good. The Zombies spice up the novel a bit, but I could do without.
ReplyDeletethe video WAS very.....interesting....hee hee! :)
ReplyDeletemaybe unique is a better word for it?
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of writing a book called "Crime and Punishment and Body Snatchers."
ReplyDeleteHmmmn......I'm curious!
ReplyDeleteAdding gore and monsters to Jane Austen is a strange twist.
ReplyDeleteBy Body Snatchers do you mean the movie where aliens clone humans and replace the originals? I wonder which characters in Crime in Punishment would be best for changing into aliens. If you go by the book I would say that all the people act human enough (i.e. none can already be suspected of being an alien). But by changing a character into an alien (say half way through the story)then you could get a completely different result. Take Razumikhin for example. What if he was an alien? How would Raskolnikov react? I bet that Raskolnikov would realize something was up.
Ashley, yes: exactly. "Body Snatchers" is not only a movie (twice made) but a sub-genre of science fiction, characterized by aliens abducting or killing humans and replacing them with their own species disguised as the original humans -- a common theme in the BBC's Doctor Who. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" does this through a disgusting pod gestation process. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin provides an interesting twist to the genre. Instead of aliens, it is the husbands of the town of Stepford, Connecticut,who manufacture look-alike gynoids as replacements for their wives, turning them into docile but hopelessly vacuous helpmates. For "Crime and Punishment" I think we need alien-induced body snatching. Gyroids are just too American.
ReplyDeleteI do not know about all this. It all sounds completely crazy and very, very strange to me.
ReplyDeleteWhat sounds crazy? Zombies and sea monsters infesting Jane Austen novels? Or, gynoids replacing housewives in Connecticut? Perhaps you're right, but is any of this any crazier than the Catskill gnomes, a group of pygmies with long, bushy beards and eyes like pigs, whose mysterious brew turns its drinkers into midget humanoids with heads swollen to twice their normal size, and their bodies shortened until they are only a little taller than the gnomes themselves. We'll meet these guys in Rip Van Winkle -- that's American Literature for you.
ReplyDelete