Word: smiths
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...Jason Rekulak, an editor at a small Philadelphia publishing house, had the bright idea to combine classic works of literature with pop-culture tropes for fun and profit. He phoned Seth Grahame-Smith, a.k.a. the luckiest freelancer in the world, and told him to write Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Grahame-Smith did - in two months flat - and it sold more than a million copies. Now it's being made into a movie starring Natalie Portman...
...success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies kicked off a literary land grab, with publishers rushing spin-offs and clones of the quote-unquote original to press. (Note to self: Clone With the Wind? A Room of One's Clone? A-clone-ment?) As for Grahame-Smith, he turned around and sold a novel called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to a large New York City publisher for a sum rumored to be in the mid - six figures. Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House, once remarked that the most surefire best seller imaginable would be a book called Lincoln's Doctor...
...conceit of Abraham Lincoln is that Grahame-Smith - his very name is a mashup! - has come into possession of Lincoln's secret diaries detailing his life as a stalker of vampires. As a frontiersboy, Lincoln loses his mother to the undead and swears lifelong vengeance. A giant among men - he was 6 ft. 4 in. (1.9 m) tall - Lincoln adopts the ax, that most American of edged weapons, as the tool of his trade, hiding it inside his signature long black coat. (See pictures of Hollywood vampires...
From there, Grahame-Smith scrolls forward through Lincoln's life, concocting a vampiric explanation for its every bump and wrinkle. The death of Lincoln's grandfather Abraham? Vampire. The death of his first love, Ann Rutledge? Vampire. Civil War? Vampires. He doesn't explicitly state that Millard Fillmore was a vampire, but I have my suspicions. (See portraits of Abraham Lincoln...
Vampires are like health care plans: everybody has his own idea about how they should work. Grahame-Smith's are inhumanly strong and only mildly fazed by sunlight. Like the vamps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they appear human until they show their true form: fangs, gross veiny blue skin and all-black eyes. Grahame-Smith describes a vampire getting his game face on: "His eyes turned black in the space of a single blink, as if the inkwells in his pupils had suddenly shattered - the spill contained behind glass." (See why zombies are the new vampires...