Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance-Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem

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Average customer rating 3.6 (18 comments)

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Let me start with being upfront about some things: 1) I’ve never been a Jane Austen fan. I find her works to be silly and inconsequential, full of upper society gossip where the women have very narrow and superficial concerns. 2) I have never been big on zombies. As a biologist, it is hard for me to suspend my disbelief when it comes to reanimating dead flesh (though if an author does it with magic, it is easier for me to ignore my skepticism). But over the past year, I have read and watched some zombie fiction so I have warmed up to the ‘ambivalent’ level (which is quite a bit higher than the cold-shouldered Hell no! level at which zombies previously resided in my world). OK, now that I have that off my chest, let me say that Jane Austen’s work, zombies, and the warrior Bennet sisters all work beautifully together to create one very entertaining listen! The entire framework from the original Pride and Prejudice is there. There just happens to be zombies, Asian martial arts, and ball jokes thrown in. A few generations before the book opens, the zombies started appearing in England. More tend to pop up during the wet season, as the muddy earth makes it easier for them to come to light. Anyway, it is now very much in vogue for rich families to have their children (male or female) trained in Japan or China in a variety of martial arts. Every family who is worth the notice has at least three dojos in which to practice daily. So, all 5 Bennet sisters were trained in Japan and the family has since returned to England. All 5 are highly encouraged to find suitable marriages sooner rather than later. But with the Unmentionables (zombies) wandering the countryside, attacking carriages and livestock willy nilly, the Bennets are often distracted from their marital goals. I really enjoyed that the author didn’t try to explain the source of the zombies, or even the mechanism that kept them going. For all practical purpose, with none of the Bennets being doctors or even scientists, it was not really relevant to their day to day lives. I quite enjoyed the numerous interactions with the zombies and the variety of ways they were dispatched. Some of the sisters prefer katanas to long bows to throwing daggers, etc. It was so very amusing to see these ladies dispatching the Undead and yet striving to remain ladylike. The story line still has Mr. Darcy, who I take is suppose to be the irritable hearth throb of the original book. He too is a warrior and often appreciates the abilities of the Bennets, especially of Elizabeth. He has the opportunity to show off his zombie beheading prowess more than once. Also, he is usually present for the ball jokes. Yep, jokes concerning the ‘most English parts’ of the male physique. And these jokes are carried out in such a fashion to compliment Jane Austen’s work, often bringing me to a fit of giggles. I can only imagine that such jokes truly did take place during that time period. This particular edition had a forward by the author in which he explains how the idea for the story came to him (via a friend). The author goes on to chat about the first reactions to the first edition of the book (people wanted more zombies!) so this is the new, improved edition with those extra zombies. It was a most excellent read and is probably the only way that anyone will ever get me to read Jane Austen as an adult. Hats off to the author!

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A fun twist on an amazing story!

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I was positively surprised by this book. Who would have thought Elizabeth Bennett as a zombie slayer would make so much sense? Anyone who loves Pride and Prejudice should definitely give it a try.

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This was such a funny read. People that have read PRide and Prejudice will especially like this new take on such a romantic classic. To be truthful, I thought that the author wrote in the "zombie attacks" quite well. He was careful about staying true to the characters and kept the storyline relatively similar (with the exception of the one huge change). I really enjoyed this as a fun light read, and I think that this author is extremely creative and clever. He has other titles, such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Each of these is such a fun read, and a new favorite for anyone that likes twists on classics.

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This is one of the best parodies I've ever read. I laughed out loud throughout the book. Well worth the read.

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If I could pay someone to erase this book from my memory and give me back the time I wasted reading it, I would. Unfortunately, I am one of those who can't help but finish a book once I have started so I had to deal with the torture of reading the whole piece of...well, I think I will just say poo. The zombie theme was added on in a very clumsy way. I was hopeful, I love unusual twists on things. There was a real chance for creativity and comedy but neither happened, only pain, nausea, and suffering...all on my part.

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A friend gave me this book, and I tried to give it back, saying it was in insult to one of my favorite authors. Then I started to read it and thought: Darn, this is really funny. I'm not sure how it would be for someone who has not read Jane Austin, but I had a lot of fun with it.

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I loved this book. It was a lot of fun to read, and a great way to enter the world of Jane Austin. I teach ninth graders and this book has generated more interest in Jane Austin's work, than at any other point in recent memory. To its detractors: this is a great piece because it motivates young people to explore an author, and a genre of literature that they probably wouldn't otherwise touch with a ten-foot pole. How can Jane Austin compete with the likes of Twilight, in the minds of 15-year-olds? Answer: sisters trained in the "deadly arts", vigilantly protecting their English village from an onslaught of flesh-eating zombies! Add some romance, and you've got a hit.

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With few exceptions, the zombie subplot reads like it's tacked on, not intertwining with the original text in a meaningful way.

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Even serious literature lovers should laugh every now and then. Pride and Prejudice has been reincarnated with some new characters, namely a few zany Zombies who run amuck. The classic has been given a makeover. This ghoulish tongue-in-cheek remake may be a new classic in making. -D.E. Boone Author of Legs Talk: A Modern Girl's Dating Tale

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My expectations were a little high for this one- I mean, the cover is fantastic! And it combines two of my favorite things. I was disappointed. Not enough zombies. For as much straight P&P story I was annoyed to not just be reading the original. For many chapters I hoped for the zombie situation to better integrate. I would have enjoyed either more shocking comedic moments involving Satan's Army or more actual literary integration in terms of themes or societal commentary, or both. Alas, it was quite unsatisfying. I still love the cover though.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has the same essential plot as the original…but with zombies and references added here and there throughout the novel. A zombie epidemic is all over England, so that England is divided into walled zones and it is dangerous to be out and about in the English countryside unless you have zombie slaying skills. Early in the book I thought that cremation would solve the problem, and indeed there are mounds where zombies are burned, but if someone is bitten by a zombie, they can become one while still alive. Thus it is the original classic but set in a bizarre alternate reality and containing rather odd plot twists. Graham-Smith punishes a couple of characters, Wickham and Mr. Collins, much more harshly than does Austen. Zombies, dojos, martial arts and references to the “Orient” in the world of Jane Austen make for some extremely surreal and hilarious moments. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Bennett sisters and their father have previously gone to China and learned martial arts in order to slay zombies. Elizabeth in particular is a very talented zombie slayer. Mr. Darcy, on the other hand, went to Japan and studied martial arts there for the same motivation. They are both cold-blooded killers, and the reader has to set aside ethics in order to find certain events in the book amusing. I am one of those people who like to read about protagonists that I like. Since Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are cold-blooded killers and Elizabeth, at least, casually kills off ninjas in a sparring match and even tears out one ninja’s heart and takes a bite out of it, I find that I don’t actually like this version of Elizabeth Bennett or Fitzwilliam Darcy. Nonetheless, alternating between scenes in which the main characters show themselves to be brutal killers with scenes in which they are concerned about proper behavior strikes me as hilarious, because there’s nothing nice and proper about murdering or crippling other characters. Despite the main characters as killers, I still manage to find the book highly amusing and the language more or less faithful to Jane Austen’s style and era. It proves to be unpredictable and somewhat reminiscent of Japanese anime, especially with the dojos at Longbourn and Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s home, Rosings. The martial arts- and zombie-related plot twists are extremely unpredictable and gruesome. I was hoping that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy would do something that would altogether eliminate the zombie problems at the end of the book, but no, zombies continue to be epidemic in this alternate reality. I notice that during a scene while Elizabeth is staying at Netherfield to take care of Jane while she has a cold, and Mr. Darcy is sitting in the drawing room writing letters with Miss Bingley chattering away at him, there are some significant changes in the text that are not exclusively related to zombies. Mr. Darcy is much ruder to his admirer and complains about her chattering. Afterwards, the conversation amid the group in the drawing room is significantly shorter than it is in Pride and Prejudice. When the Bingley sisters sing at the piano, they sing a wacky song about defending England against zombies that is most definitely not in the original. A lot of the dialogue is cut short, dumbed down for modern audiences, but more importantly allowing the book to have plenty of zombie scenes without doubling its length. However, at the risk of sounding too knit-picking, I noticed one scene in which the coauthor cut a little too much of the dialogue. It is just after Elizabeth has refused Mr. Collins’s proposal and her mother speaks to Mr. Collins. Graham-Smith has left out Collins’s comment that if Lizzie is willful and foolish, then maybe it’s better if he doesn’t marry her. However, the coauthor leaves in Mrs. Bennett’s comment to her husband that Mr. Collins is beginning to change his mind about marrying Elizabeth. This could be cause for confusion for someone who doesn’t have the original fresh in mind. Fortunately, I am reading both version of Pride and Prejudice simultaneously, chapter by chapter. Chipmunks make an appearance on page 90, although I happen to know that chipmunks are only from North America and are not native of England. I learned this from an Englishman in India, when we were discussing the Indian squirrels that look like chipmunks with unusually bushy tails. The flaw that raises my ire and makes me want to chop the coauthor’s head off with a Samurai sword is the housekeeper’s bound feet at Pemberley. The manor-house is built in the style of a Japanese palace, which makes sense considering that Mr. Darcy has had his martial arts training in Japan. The housekeeper is wearing a kimono, but she has bound feet, which was strictly a Chinese, not Japanese, tradition. It is furthermore a particularly sadistic and misogynistic tradition that involves grossly mutilating a girl’s feet and making it very difficult for her to walk. The housekeeper is English, not Chinese, making it all the more unlikely that she would be willing to have her feet bound. My ability to detach from ethics for the sake of sitting back and laughing draws the line here; bound feet are no laughing matter. In short, the book is not perfect, but few things are. On a more positive side, I understand the use of shortening dialogue significantly and am glad that Seth Grahame-Smith did this, because otherwise this book would be nearly twice as long as the original. I have come to the conclusion that while Pride and Prejudice with Zombies is certainly entertaining and highly amusing, it simply does not compare to the original Pride and Prejudice and will not be read for as many years.

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This book has some amusing parts, but overall I found it to be poorly done. The zombie and ninja references are thrown in wherever it seems like you would expect one, but since the basic plot sticks exactly to the original P&P, the characters can't react in any sort of reasonable way to new zombie bits. In fact, in many scenes, the characters' reactions (or lack thereof) to the new parts test my suspension of disbelieve more than the zombies themselves do. Overall, not worth reading.

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It’s hard to imagine a 2009 title more anticipated than “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” The concept is nothing short of brilliant, combining Jane Austen’s classic novel of society and romance with “ultraviolent zombie mayhem.” The possibilities seemed endless, ranging from half the main characters having their heads cracked open to windows of a manor house cracked open with decaying fists. Indeed, it seemed like something that could go so over the top it would make Austen herself rise from the grave in complaint. So does it measure up to that promise of madcap zombie fun, or does the gimmick burn out less than half-way through? The answer is neither – but that turns out to be to the book’s benefit. Rather than sacrifice a work of literature to Internet memes, “Zombies” actually spends more time with the original story than expected, reshaping the characters but never excising the plotlines. It’s not what most readers would expect going in, but in many ways it makes for a much better book, regardless of whether you favor Jane Austen or George Romero. For the uninitiated, the original “Pride and Prejudice” is the story of Elizabeth Bennett, the most willful of a country gentleman’s five daughters. Continually badgered by her mother’s desire to marry her off and the flighty attitudes of her younger sisters, she finds a new target for her ire after the haughty Mr. Darcy dismisses her at a ball. As the two continue to interact, they find their terse reactions might be only a cover, masking an attraction that must overcome pride and social circumstances. The new version keeps the original narrative, but adds a twist in that the countryside is crawling with the living dead. For the past five decades England has been besieged by hordes of the “unmentionables,” which rise from their graves in tattered suits and gowns to swarm manor houses and crack open the skulls of those within. Elizabeth and Darcy, along with several other characters, are now highly trained warriors who are capable of decapitating their enemies and feel no qualms about setting the bodies ablaze. What is interesting about this undead invasion is that while they retain many of the more fearful aspects – passing zombie infection through bites, pitiful moaning and feasting on brains – it never becomes the overarching concern of the story. Most of the recent efforts in the genre have focused on the apocalyptic aspect, but the world of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” still considers social norms and inheritance the greatest of concerns, and Austen’s verbal sparring is supplemented by actual combat rather than replaced. Keeping the language turns out to be the smartest decision the book could make, as mixing the free indirect speech of the original book with nightmarish threats makes it funnier than any gore-splattered zombie film. The precise verbal patterns see characters encountering the “sorry stricken,” weapons are drawn and they are “promptly dispatched to Hell,” and given “a proper Christian beheading.” A variety of incongruously humorous scenarios ensue, such as when two zombies slaughter an entire staff of servants in the kitchen and the party’s host can only observe “a delightful array of tarts, exotic fruits, and pies, sadly soiled by blood and brains, and thus unusable. The subtleness of the zombie humor keeps the altered narrative going, but the book’s real strength is in the indirect changes the threat provides. Elizabeth and her sisters have been trained in the deadly arts by Master Liu of China, and are capable of walking on their hands, administering cuts of shame in times of failure and fight with “a razor-sharp dagger with one hand, the other tucked modestly into the small of her back.” They and other characters have grown up with the zombie threat, and as a consequence match breeding with battle skills. With the characters tooled in this fashion, it enlivens the original’s conflicts considerably. Elizabeth sees Darcy’s slights not merely social but an insult to her warrior honor, and vows to take his head after their first meeting, and when he confesses his lover her first reaction is to kick his head into a fireplace mantel. Lady Catherine, the preeminent noble in the book, is respected as much for her elite guard of ninjas as her extreme wealth, and Darcy’s dispute with Mr. Wickham is less about money and more about severe beatings. The moves seem to make the characters more interesting, as they can act on their feelings rather than just talking. In the end, the real victor of this parody appears to be Jane Austen herself, as her book has been reanimated in a way not even Keira Knightly could pull off. Fans of the original will be both taken aback and charmed by their beloved characters talking casually about ripping out an enemy’s heart, and those who haven’t read it before will be intrigued as to how the story could work without. “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” has not only had a brilliant idea, but handled it in the most competent fashion.

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Definitely amusing, and worth buying just for the looks on people's faces when they see it on your coffeetable. I was disappointed, however, with just how abridged the original Pride and Prejudice text was. Half of what I was looking forward to was a stark contrast between the oh-so-restrained comedy of manners and zombie violence. That was there, but not as much as I was expecting. That said, I actually liked the character development. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are actually far more interesting people with ninja training, not to mention Darcy's aunt who's name I can't remember at the moment. The illustrations are also fabulous. So I give this book a solid three stars. Worth buying, but don't expect the most hilarious read ever.

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After suffering through Pride and Prejudice in a women's lit class in high school, being one of the three males in the class, and undergoing much embarrassment for my lack of understanding of the subject matter, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is bittersweet redemption. It was very nice while reading this to feel as though I am exacting revenge on Jane Austen's literary masterpiece by not only understanding the work but also enjoying a pseudo-perverse amalgamation of her work and a horror/comedy film. No doubt some Austen fans will cry "heresy" at what Seth Grahame-Smith has done, that is take a classic piece of literature and splice in zombie references, but I think others will accept this work as the kind of flattery that it is to Ms. Austen. Others, like myself, who were intellectually incapable of understanding the works of Jane Austen, will feel sweet vindication from enjoying her great work with a smidgen of added immaturity. There is no doubt that Grahame-Smith has accomplished something incredibly innovative with this work, possibly spawning a new literary classic remade hilarious genre, and there is also no doubt that he has done so very well. I recommend this book for anyone who enjoys comedy, zombies, and classic women's literature and I never thought I would recommend anything on those terms.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. As you can see, this isn't your traditional Pride and Prejudice. And Elizabeth and Jane aren't your traditional heroines. Meet the Bennet family. "The business of Mr. Bennet's life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennet's was to get them married." Why is life so dangerous? Zombies, of course! Fortunately, all five of his daughters have been trained in the deadly arts. All know how to defend themselves from the unfortunates, the undead, the unmentionables. If you're familiar with the original, you'll recognize the basics. Yes, some of Jane Austen's lovely text remains. It definitely provides an outline for the rest. Here is a classic scene which you'll remember if you've read the book or scene the movie: "Upon my honor!" cried Mr. Bingley, "I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening; and there are several of them you see uncommonly pretty." "You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room," said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet. "Oh! She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable." "Which do you mean?" and turning round he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." As Mr. Darcy walked off, Elizabeth felt her blood turn cold. She had never in her life been so insulted. The warrior code demanded she avenge her honour. Elizabeth reached down to her ankle, taking care not to draw attention. There, her hand met the dagger concealed beneath her dress. She meant to follow this proud Mr. Darcy outside and open his throat. But no sooner had she grabbed the handle of her weapon than a chorus of screams filled the assembly hall, immediately joined by the shattering of window panes....(13-14) Here is another one of my favorites, the scene where the highly critical Catherine meets Elizabeth for the first time: "Have your ninjas left you?" "We never had any ninjas." "No ninjas! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home without any ninjas! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must have been quite a slave to your safety." Elizabeth could hardly help smiling as she assured her that had not been the case. (126) Yes, the book is gimmicky. But it's clever and fun. Though personal taste plays a big role in rather you find it so. I enjoyed most of this one. I loved some of the twists and turns. Some of the lines were just genius. There was only one chapter which angered more than amused. (But I won't spoil that for you!) You'll find all the same characters and situations...but the women--as warriors--are more empowered than the originals. As a comedy, this works. And Pride and Prejudice becomes a page-turner for a whole other reason.

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Ever so slowly, the literary world begins to embrace (re-embrace?) the zombie as a meaningful societal metaphor and thereby making it more precise and legitimate. Kudos to Jane Austen for having the foresight and to Seth Grahame-Smith for bring it to our collective attention.