First, a warning: If you really dislike Jane Austin, you will probably not love this book. That is because this revision of Pride and Prejudice is not really a rewriting of the original; it pretty much stays the same, but with zombies added. It is still about 85% Jane Austin, and 15% zombies. The zombie fighting and carnage are actually quite good, but you do feel, during some of the longer passages where people just socialize, that the second author is throwing in the odd zombie reference as an empty gesture, and you start wishing for some proper gore and carnage. God help me ensure that my high school English lit teacher never finds out I said that, but it is true. Anyhow, I am not sure the zombie action is sufficient to make up for a loathing of Regency-period comedies of manners.

On the other hand, if you have never read Pride and Prejudice or Jane Austin, I am really not sure what you will make of the book. It certainly stands on its own, but I'm not sure it does so purely as as zombie fiction. If you just want a good zombie novel, go read World War Z (seriously: go read it right now if you haven't already), or any of a number of other fine classics.

If, however, you read Pride & Prejudice in high school, remember it more or less (waspish heroine starts off hating the rich, arrogant guy she ends up marrying, and various people act like idiots due to snobbery and misunderstanding), and you didn't hate it, you will probably get a major kick out of it when zombies are added. Because, really, what isn't improved by the addition of some brain-eating savagery by the walking dead? (Zombies are kind of like salsa in that.)

The zombies are actually blended better into the original than you would expect, though it is always obvious where the additions are because - well, zombies. But Austin's tone and language are mimicked pretty well. (I particularly liked one of the euphemisms by which people referred to the zombies: "unmentionables," which gave me an image of underpants roaming the countryside and devouring travelers.) You find yourself struggling to remember what the new stuff changes or replaces. Sometimes you realize the addition of zombie elements actually serves to further the original themes of the book. For example, a semi-spoiler: when a certain secondary character succumbs to the plague, you may find yourself thinking how perfectly this explains the character's more subtle personality transformation in the original. Which I thought was pretty clever.

One objection I had was that the zombie-fighting turns Elizabeth Bennet into something of a stereotypical historical romance novel heroine. Someone once noted that historical romance heroines come in two main flavors: sweet-natured, helpless types who prevail through excessive goodness, and the ones who ride around on stallions waving swords about. Based on a brief period reading bodice rippers some years ago, that seems more or less correct. One of the nice things about good romances (of any era) is that the characters break out of that general mold and do something ... interesting. Austin's characters are great because they are realistically flawed - not in some superfical way (or in some way that is thought to have been frowned on historically but is now deemed a virtue, like being outspoken), but deeply, and that needs to be resolved to achieve a happy ending. Well, adding zombies doesn't quite squelch all of that in Pride and Prejudice, but I was surprised to discover how easy it was to turn the robust character of Elizabeth into something that seemed a lot more like the off-the-shelf sword-waving stereotype. (Still a very well fleshed out and well written character, but a stereotype none the less.)

This was frustrating because I think you could have had the zombies, and even had Elizabeth and other characters you wished to show to be sensible dispatching them with some ability, without having everyone training with kung-fu masters in the Orient and flying about like Jackie Chan. Maybe it went just a bit too far. That being said, the fight scenes were a lot of fun in their own right: social combat made literal.

Anyhow, as a curiosity, as a literary joke and as a fun zombified read in its own right, I have to highly recommend this one. 9/10