Write Your Own Bestseller

What do you call that person who does not like the idea or book or movie that everyone else in the universe is LOVING right now? It's not exactly a party pooper; that's more of a person who brings down a group of shiny happy people with a drawn-out story about her latest infected hang-nail. No, I'm talking about the person who looks at the current rage, the hottest fashion, the summer must-read, and says, "Um, yeah. No thanks. Not for me." Or, even worse, who says, "Yeah, I read/tasted/wore that and it was boring/gross/unflattering."

I don't know what to call that person, but I'm about to be her. Fair warning.

So today, on summer reading lists everywhere: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It's a hilarious premise. Genius actually. It has a few moments of brilliant execution, where only a couple of words in a given passage have been changed from the original, so that some Benett daughter or other is lamenting some boy or other, and it becomes clear that the reason she'll never appeal to him is not that she has no fortune (which she doesn't) but that she can't stop hiking up her skirts and showing off her zombie-killing prowess, which really is not quite ladylike enough and is somewhat intimidating to all the male less-proficient zombie killers near Lonbourne.

But, New York Times bestseller list notwithstanding, it's a little bit of a one-trick pony. Mail delivery is slowed because mail coaches are invaded by zombies; the odious Mr. Collins marries Charlotte Lucas and is so obtuse in this, as everything else, that he can't see that she's been infected and is turning into a zombie before his very eyes. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, so sure of her superiority over everyone else, obviously has a dojo full of Japanese ninjas and some mad zombie-fighting skills herself. Elizabeth gets to kick Darcy in the jaw -- which is the one moment in the novel where anyone who's ever read the original will jump up and shout with glee because, honestly? Darcy has been deserving that kick for a solid 100 years.

But the zombies and any mention of them disappear for at least 75 pages or so, long enough for a reader to think, okay, enough with the romance and endless gratuitous mentions of vomiting, already, where are the zombies? And also long enough to think: really, what's the point of zombies in this book anyway?

On the other hand, it's hardly meant to be serious reading of the Great Literature variety, so one might call it successful at meeting its objectives. It's not an utter waste of time, although I do think that my friend pegged it when he said that, in the end, the people who love classics will only have so much patience for the zombie intrusion, and the people who love zombie lit will only have so much patience for the stilted language of the romance. Were the marriage of genres more deftly handled, this objection might be overcome. I'm not one of those purist naysayers who claim this book is a heresy. I think, quite frankly, it needed a bit of shaking up. But I think the addition of the gore could have been done with a bit less mash-up and a bit more finesse.

To my mind, more than half the delight in this hyrid novel comes from the brilliant absurdity of the premise itself. Which is why my friend and I had a great time a while ago trying to think of other old novels that might be usefully spruced up with the addition of a few zombies.

D.H. Lawrence's books might become more interesting: Sons and Lovers and Zombies or Lady Chatterly's Brains, for example, might certainly keep me awake better than the originals. I personally wouldn't add zombies to anything by James Joyce because those novels are already out there enough. Adding zombies might be enough to make readers' heads explode. (Which, come to think of it, would be exactly what zombies would like. What a great way to turn a classic modernist novel into an interactive post-modern one, assuming there are real zombies out there to partake in the feast produced by readers of Ulysses and Zombies, of course. And now, this has become an aside that the Bloggess could certainly write better.)

We decided Dracula didn't really need zombies added, though Friend suggested that it might be improved through the addition of the Hardy Boys. In fact, the bumbling band of boy/men who hunt down Dracula could easily be the progenitors of the Hardy Boys, so that could be an interesting re-write.

See? Try it yourself. Nearly as good as reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is thinking of other books you'd personally like to zombify. Or enhance with a band of boy detectives. Your choice. What's on your list to be the next great best-seller?