Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls is a perfectly readable, albeit unnecessary and underwhelming, prequel to the surprise mega-hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen. They’re running a contest at Quirk’s website where you can win a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies gift-pack, but my day job, which slowed down the review hitting Blog@Newsarama and Comic Related, may have cost you readers your opportunity to win it. Still, click through and try it out here.
After years of imitators spurred by the success of 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake re-popularized the zombie genre in film, and an onslaught of comics and novels both well-done and not, Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies added a clever twist: rather than trying to capture the horror and graphic violence of a zombie invasion in prose—a difficult task to master—he took a bizarre and hilarious idea—adding “…And Zombies” to the end of the title of Austen’s beloved Regency romance, and rather than rewriting the characters and the comic drama of the story, he just interspersed additional prose with the existing work. It was a fresh and self-aware take on the concept that might not have been brilliant, but was cleverly subversive and which retained much of the character work and clever plotting and pacing of Austen’s original.
Unfortunately, Steve Hockensmith, author of the successful “Holmes on the Range” series of genre-mashup novels, doesn’t have Austen to co-write with him. The self-awareness and self-parodic elements of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (themselves no longer particularly unique in an ocean of “Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim” and “Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”-style ripoffs) are largely lost in this fairly generic prequel, which takes a fairly standard batch of characters and builds them to the point where, by the time the novel ends, they’re fairly recognizable as the characters at the start of the previous novel. It’s a fairly thoughtful and organic character development process; while that’s good from a writing standpoint, it makes the story far less gripping because Elizabeth Bennett is basically unrecognizable at the start of the story. She’s no longer Austen’s character, with a pinch of badass thrown in; here, Lizzie’s badassery grows as her personality becomes stronger, building to the point where she’s recognizable as the character who made the book so memorable and giving birth to the franchise. Unfortunately, that means the character we read about for a good chunk of this book is nobody we recognize or care about.
Furthermore, the story feels a little less-than-necessary. The training alluded to in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was enough information for this reviewer; I didn’t need to see it up-close and personal. The ninjas and the fight scenes in the first novel were bits that I skimmed over as I read it, feeling it a little too indulgent and pointless—emphasizing that part of the story has little appeal, even if it’s done pretty well.
The romantic subplot is handled capably, but doesn’t feels utterly without consequence, given that readers will know from the word “go” that not only are the Bennett girls are all single at the start of the original novel—but several of the characters who figure prominently into it were never mentioned in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, indicating that their importance in the grand scheme of things isn’t great.
Ultimately Hockensmith’s writing isn’t at fault here; the book’s simply unnecessary. It suffers from many of the same difficulties as fan fiction—the ones that comic book publishers often encounter when bringing characters and concepts from “What If?” and “Elseworlds” stories into the central canon: It loses all the elements of the original that made it different and clever, opting instead for the furtherance of franchise at the expense of quality and originality.
January 17th, 2011 at 1:55 pm
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