Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

Hertfordshire, you say? The area has far greater significance for me now as I know someone who lives there, but it has been of interest to me since it was the setting for, you know, Pride and Prejudice: The Original (But No Longer the One and Only) by the long-dead but never to be forgotten 18th Century author, Jane Austen.

A prequel to the runaway 2009 bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahme-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls is written by Steve Hockensmith, for whom this is a departure. As he says on his blog (where he worries fans of his debut novel, Holmes on the Range, may wonder at the lack of cowboys - and, presumably - detectives - in his latest novel):

Potential new readers, meet loyal old readers. I think you'll find you have a lot in common. Beyond a fondness for the word "frakkin'," I mean. You like historical novels. You like funny novels. You like novels with a touch of the macabre. You like Raisinets, Air Supply and long walks in the park.

Where will all this end? It's one thing for Kurosawa to rewrite Lear and film it as Ran - there are cultural translation issues that make it appropriate to do so. But is reworking Jane Austen for the Buffy crowd really such a great idea? Will it satisfy either Buffy/Twilight fans or tried and true Austen fans? Or will there be (more) swooning from the pressure of corsets drawn too tight? (Actually, corsets were a Victorian thing, not a Regency thing - the one character who wears one in Dawn of the Dreadfuls is male - and it's called a truss. Reshaping and restraining blubber is still its chief purpose, however.)

Luckily, Dawn of the Dreadfuls actually has merit as a novel, although I was startled to discover this. It's not that I expected to hate it - I was intensely curious about it and leapt at the chance to get my hands on an advance review copy (ARC) when Raincoast Books, its Canadian distributor, offered them to bloggers via Twitter and the Raincoast blog. (The actual publisher is the quirky Quirk Books and its Quirk Classics series.) I just thought it would be an amusing read-in-one-sitting novel, like Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary and Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

In fact, Dawn of the Dreadfuls isn't as funny as I expected it would be (although there are definitely scenes that will translate to high comedic humour when/if it's filmed - as long as you aren't quite as terrified of zombies as I am - I barely made it through Night of the Living Dead once and don't care to repeat the experience - and ask my cousin how I used to awaken the entire household when we used to watch a 1960s TV show that featured zombies in the middle of the night - of course in that series zombie-killing methodology involved filling their mouths with salt and sewing them shut, and it was the needle through cartilage bit that always got to me, having been taught to sew buttons back on at age three).

The story begins about two weeks before Elizabeth Bennet, second-eldest of the five Longbourn-inhabiting Bennet daughters, is due to 'come out' in society at a local Meryton ball. Eldest sister Jane is already 'out' and has attracted the attention of Lord Lumpley, Netherfield-inhabiting baron (and libertine, according to middle Bennet sister Kitty, whose approach to life is highly analytical and academic in nature - this doesn't mean she's wrong, though). At the funeral of the local pharmacist, however, Meryton residents discover the scourge of the 'dreadfuls' (it's not polite to refer to them as zombies') isn't, in fact, over, despite the great battles of 30 years earlier (known as The Troubles). Relaxation of the burial laws means corpses have been buried in recent years with their heads still attached - and when you encounter one dreadful, it's only a matter of time before you meet a whole lot more of them.

Mr. Bennet was involved in the battles to defeat the dreadfuls 30 years earlier. They were defeated only as a result of intensive training in 'the dreadful arts' and as part of his training, Mr. Bennet has vowed to raise his children as warriors in the Shaolin way. Naturally, as the father of five girls married to Mrs. Bennet, who prevails in domestic matters through sheer volubility, he's broken his vow, and must now scramble to get his daughters trained so they can defend themselves and help put an end to the dreadfuls' scourge. 'Now far too belatedly, we begin your training. It will not be easy. You will be sorely tested. You will cry and bleed. You will face the derision, probably even the condemnation, of your community. Yet you will persevere on behalf of the very souls who now find you so ridiculous...for the dreadful scourge has returned, and once more warriors must walk the green fields of England!'

As the five Bennet girls embark on the path of the warrior, they encounter a variety of men. There is, of course, their 'master' Geoffrey Hawksworth, imported to train them in the warrior arts. There is the single-minded Lord Lumpley, who's managed to come up with a singularly effective method of disposing of the maidens he's ravished when they prove inconvenient (defined as no longer virginal or inconveniently pregnant while unsuitable for marriage), and who begins his days kicking gin bottles and maids out of his capacious (presumably four-poster) bed. There is the handsome but excessively proper Lt. Tindall, who struggles with his admiration for Jane while deploring her newly acquired prowess with the katana as she wields it to separate zombies from their heads. There is the quintessential absent-minded professor, Dr. Keckilpenny, whose inattention to detail and determinedly academic approach is in sharp contrast to Master Hawksworth's single-minded focus on practicalities.

Interestingly, Dawn of the Dreadfuls poses the question some of us have been asking ever since we first read Pride and Prejudice: how on earth did Mr. and Mrs. Bennet ever end up married to each other? Glimmers of an answer appear in the character of Capt. Cannon, who has lost all his limbs during The Troubles and is now wheeled around in a cart by two soldiers appropriately named Right Limb and Left Limb.

For me, Dawn of the Dreadfuls works because it manages to be sufficiently entertaining while actually conveying a substantive message or two, chief of which is, fathers form feminists by insisting they not be restricted by convention. Which is a message we don't hear often enough - although an earlier post on this blog took at look at how another popular (although less literary) series told an earlier generation of young women they could be whatever they wanted to be, avuncular pats on the head notwithstanding. And for more on Jane Austen's relevance to 21st Century women, there's this post.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will be released to the (hopefully) suspecting public on March 23, 2010. Readers also have a chance to win one of 50 Quirk Classics Prize Packs - details on the contest here.