Monster Mashup

Maybe it's because I never really cared for Jane Austen, but I find this rather funny. From the New York Times:

Quirk Books announced the publication of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” an edition of Austen’s classic juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem” by a Los Angeles television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith. (First line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”)

But wait, there's more:

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures was developing a project called “Pride and Predator,” in which the giant alien from the 1987 cult classic pays a call on the Bennet family.
...
To some scholars, however, it’s a short leap from verbal sparring to real swordplay. “It makes sense to give Lizzie a grander scope for her action,” said Deidre Lynch, an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and editor of “Janeites,” a collection of scholarly essays about Austen devotees. “It goes with the muddy petticoats and the rambling across the countryside in this unladylike way. The next step is ninja training.”

And there is no sign that it will stop there:

Next year, Ballantine Books will publish Michael Thomas Ford’s novel “Jane Bites Back,” in which Austen turns into a vampire, fakes her own death and lives quietly as a bookstore owner before finally driving a stake through the heart of everyone who has been making money off her for the last two centuries.

Then again, I did just start reading Drood, a fictional account of the "events" that led up to the writing of his last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. From the flap copy:

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.

Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?

Although I'm only 50 pages into it, it's not bad, being narrated by the character of Dickens' friend and author in his own right, Wilkie Collins, so it has that Victorian tone to it. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully no zombies will show up.