This book clearly was written for only one person — me — and yet it’s been enormously popular and has already landed its author lucrative book and movie deals. I’m happy for him, because even though I thought the novel was ultimately a disappointment, I still smile when I think about it.
Like many Onion articles, the title is the best part and then the story is unevenly funny the rest of the way through. To recap if for some reason you haven’t heard, the novel is at least 80% original text (heavily condensed) and 20% “bone-crunching zombie mayhem.” Your mileage may vary, but for me the zombie mayhem didn’t work as often as it should have.
I suppose “spoilers” follow.
Some things slot in nicely — the soldiers are garrisoned at Meryton to repel not the French but the undead menace. Elizabeth Bennett’s friend Charlotte agrees to marry the odious Mr. Collins because she’s already infected by the zombie plague. (If you want to read that as a feminist metaphor about brainwashing otherwise intelligent young women into loveless marriages, I won’t stop you, but it’s probably overreaching.) And perhaps the most perfect scene in the book is Darcy’s first declaration of love, the original dialogue interspersed with Elizabeth physically kicking his ass:
“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the slightest grief which I might have felt in beheading you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.”
This is funny. Other stuff, not so much. I could not buy the Bennett sisters (and even more, Lady Catherine de Bourgh) as karate masters. Zombie Charlotte is funny when subtle but gets increasingly less so. The arc of the story and its ending aren’t subverted in any interesting way. And I definitely didn’t need all those ninjas.
But complaining about the book feels churlish. It’s a funny concept. The cover art is great. Someone will take this idea and execute it better, maybe even Seth Grahame-Smith.