Zombie Renaissance

n+1 discusses the who/what/why/where/how of the zombie novels that seem to be awfully popular these days.

From the story...

Critics have been worrying about the death of the novel for decades, and the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is unlikely to change that. The leading suspect in the novel’s murder has so often been mass culture—thief of time, sapper of seriousness—and here it is growing upon a literary classic like an aggressive tumor:

“And is Miss Darcy as handsome as her brother?” said Mrs. Gardiner.
“Oh! Yes, the handsomest young lady that ever was seen; and so accomplished! She beheaded her first unmentionable not one month after her eleventh birthday!”

It would be one thing if Austen’s masterpiece had been fully reimagined by Seth Grahame-Smith as a horror story. That would have made it an eccentric addition to a growing body of Austen fan fiction from which one can, for instance, get Mr. Darcy’s perspective on the novel’s events, or follow him into his first years of marriage to Elizabeth Bennet. With its frequently harsh judgments of individual human worth and savage wars of social position, the brightly lit novel of manners makes for dark shadows that might have been worth exploring. Instead Grahame-Smith merely tacks the equivalent of “and zombies” onto various parts of Austen’s public domain text and calls it a day. Also (but perhaps advertising this would have made the title too long) the Bennet sisters have been trained as ninjas. The mash-up plays like a long, dumb joke and could not have taken more than a few weekends to accomplish. Even so, it is strangely appealing, and has been outselling new copies of the original on Amazon by a mile.

Of course, from a more forgiving perspective, the very success of such a gimmick might be taken as a sign of continuing life in the “carnivalesque” genre of the novel. Here is the Novel reconnecting with the People, giving them What They Want, and what they want are zombies.