Zombie dawn – or how I learned to love Jane Austen

Feb 13 2009 by Valerie Hill, Liverpool Daily Post

YOU'VE probably heard the word cross-over applied to music, where opera stars warble an album of easy listening hits, or jazz singers take on the classics.

Certainly, it can go horribly wrong, with Rod Stewart caterwauling through the great American songbook.

Like most artistic endeavour these days, this is not about culture, but money. So what's good enough for Susannah, the musical cash cow, is good enough for the literary golden goose.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before it happened, but Jane Austen is having a makeover. I'm not talking about the blessed Regency novelist treating herself to a nice perm and a touch of lippy, but one where her heroines are launched into an entirely new and anachronistic world.

We've already seen Austen’s spirited young fictional ladies like Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters transformed into Californian Valley Girls and Bollywood princesses, but now they face a plague of the undead.

This modern threat is revealed in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody of Austen's most popular novel, to be published in April. A film is already planned of this new British book phenomenon, dubbed “monster-lit”.

The surprise is that it's taken so long to merge two such commercially successful genres as Jane Austen and horror.

Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the parody and lives in Los Angeles (natch), created a diagram to show the links between classic novels to film genres such as vampires, aliens and robots.

“It quickly became obvious that Jane Austen laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel,” says Grahame-Smith. Of course! How come that the revered literary critic and Austen champion FR Leavis missed that one?

It makes perfect sense when you realise an Army regiment arrived on Miss Bennet's doorstep in the original novel, when it should have been fighting in the Napoleonic wars.

Grahame-Smith explains: “It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain eaters, obviously.”

As the cannibalistic undead obliterate the quaint villages of Longbourn and Meryton, the five Bennet sisters turn into zombie slayers, luckily having been trained in martial arts since birth, greatly helped by Ninja expert, Capt Darcy.

Grahame-Smith claims to be no Bennet bonnet-basher, saying that 85% of his book is the original Austen text.

What next? Macbeth Disco Champion, Frankenstein's High School Musical or Pollyanna Prime Suspect?

Luckily, Jane Austen's work is so robust that it won't be laid waste by an attack from your average zombie flesh-eater. So you can sleep soundly in your four-poster tonight.

Hang on, what's that scary, other-worldly scratching noise outside? Oh, it's only FR Leavis turning in his grave.