Zombie Command

If you’re like me, you started reading zombie books because of the crazy amounts of blood and gore that could be pulled off their pages; you can get away with so much more in a book than in a movie. No matter how great your CGI and special effects, there are limits to what you can actually achieve on-screen. But eventually your blood-lust began to wane. You started to want more than just new ways to disembowel the living. You wanted to find books that had a different take on the undead or focused on the living and their interactions in a post-apocalyptic world. You wanted to find meaning behind the madness. Then you found Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and realized none of that crap really matters, you just want a fun read.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, is a fun undead romp through 19th century England. If you’ve ever read the original book upon which it’s based, you know it’s full of pompous and posh social aristocrats who look down their noses at everyone and love to have lavish parties for no good reason. Oh, and their always spending the night at each other’s estates. Not like a sleepover, but more like that guy in college who would come over for a ‘visit’ and then live on your couch for a while. But I digress…

Here’s the plot of the original story: the Bennets are a family of all girls, a couple of whom are squirrely, but then there’s Elizabeth, the spunky main character, whose mother is annoying and the father lounges around drunkenly most of the day. Long story short, Elizabeth goes back and forth the entire book over a handful of guys as to whether or not she loves them, hates them, are they lying to her, blah blah blah. Lots of romantic-comedy-like misunderstandings ensue and in the end Elizabeth falls in love and gets married to a good guy.

Here’s the plot of the new story: It’s the same, plus zombies. Genius!

That one addition takes this book from being your basic run-of-the-mill high school reading standard to a comedic masterpiece. It’s not like a stereotypical zombie book where the focus is on gory scenes of dismemberment and evisceration. In fact, there’s very little blood that is shed in this book. Instead, you view the undead as part of everyday British high-society life. They’re basically treated as weeds, nasty things that pop up when and where you don’t want them; time to call in a professional and treat the place.

The focus is still primarily the original plot. Elizabeth Bennet is seen as slightly strange because she’s a progressive woman and speaks her mind. In PPZ, this is still the case, only she’s now also a Shao Lin master with an incredible talent at destroying the undead. What is really considered a put-off is that she often carries around a musket for zed head-shots, instead of the more lady-like throwing knife, which can be easily sheathed and concealed under her skirt. Scandalous! Also because her mouthy-ness tends to get her in trouble, she’s prone to martial-arts sparring with random other characters throughout the book. One scene that’s classic is when she’s being confronted by one of her romantic interests, Mr. Darcy, and he makes the mistake of offending her:

Mr. Darcy changed colour; but the emotion was short, for Elizabeth presently attacked with a series of kicks, forcing him to counter with the Drunken Washwoman Defense. One of her kicks found its mark, and Darcy was sent into the mantelpiece with such force as to shatter its edge.

As for the zombies themselves, you rarely hear them called by the z-word. Instead, they are more properly referred to as “the unmentionables”. They’re basically like your original Romero zombies: infected through bites, slow moving and annoyingly persistent. They are eliminated by the typical methods: trauma to the brain, removal of the head and fire. The PPZ zombie infection is a little different in that while most stories have people getting infected and dying quickly, this infection takes a long time to run its course. A friend of Elizabeth’s, Charlotte, gets infected and endures the infection over the course of a few months. All the while, Charlotte’s idiot husband is oblivious, even as bits and pieces of his wife are oozing and plopping into her soup bowl during a visit.

My take on PPZ: if you love reading and love interesting twists to already great stories, you’ll love this book. If you like zombie books that are off-the-beaten-path, you’ll love this book. If you like zombie books that are all about rip ‘em up and eat ‘em, death to the world scenarios, then you’ll not like this book.

Follow @KGLucas on Twitter for her random musings on all things zombie and more.

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3. Pride And Prejudice And Zombies: Dawn Of The Dreadfuls
4. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – TV Series
5. Stacy: Attack Of The Schoolgirl Zombies – Review