Word: austen
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Apparently no one is safe from the shambling, newly marketable armies of the dead - not even Jane Austen. Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of a new novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, about a strangely familiar English family called the Bennets that is struggling to marry off five daughters while at the same time fighting off wave after wave of relentless, remorseless undead - since, as the novel's classic first line tells us, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains...
...surprising how easily Austen's novel succumbs to the conventions of a zombie flick. Much of Austen's work is about using wit and charm and good manners to avoid talking about ugly realities like sex and money. In Grahame-Smith's version, zombies are just another one of those ugly realities. "What was so fun about the book is the politeness of it all," says Grahame-Smith, who's a freelance writer in Los Angeles. "They don't even like to say the word zombie, even though their country is besieged by zombies. They're everywhere, and people...
...surprised at how easily the book meshed with the zombie genre. It made a weird kind of sense. It was strange. It's almost as if Jane Austen was subconsciously setting this up for us. You have this sharp-tongued, fiercely independent heroine. It's not a huge leap to say she's a sharp-daggered, fiercely independent heroine. And then you have Darcy, on the other side, who's a pompous and privileged guy. And you say, all right, he's a pompous and privileged slayer. And that's how they battle it out with each other...
...starting to see the logic. So much of Austen is about the unmentionable - about using wit and good manners to cover up nasty things like sex and money. So why not have one of those unmentionable things be zombies? That was what was so funny to me about this idea, is the fact that these people in Austen's books are kind of like zombies. They live in this bubble of extreme wealth and privilege, and they're so preoccupied with the little trivial nothings of their lives - who's dating who, who's throwing this ball, or having this...
...horrible things about her in this version. Like, she should just be happy that she's invited to this dinner party, she's a spinster, she should expect nothing more than a crust of bread washed down with a cup of loneliness. Kind of playing up what Jane Austen had already put there...