(no subject)

[chelseagirl]

As some of my friends will recall, I was the one who literally shrieked with glee when I first got my hands on a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. How uncool of me. And when I read it, I found it delightful, though by the end the seams were showing. Since then, I have chosen to skip over Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters not to mention Jane Slayre and all the seemingly dozens of other add-ons to this trend. Mansfield Park and Mummies is tempting, but only because one assumes Fanny Price ends up with a much-needed spine, and I did succumb to Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, which deeply disappointed me. But . . . this trend has gotten so far out of hand that it's just funny to see what they're doing next.

Still, I did kind of like the trailer for PP&Z: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, even if I doubt I'll actually read the book. Something about actually seeing the Bennet sisters in their Empire-waist muslin dresses handling those katanas brought back the glee.

So now I'm trying to figure out what are the LEAST likely classics to get this treatment.

The Trial or The Castle or anything else by Franz Kafka. The added ultraviolence would mean something had to ACTUALLY HAPPEN other than being shuttled around from incomprehensible event to incomprehensible event. (Er, incomprehensible to the characters, not the reader, that is.)

In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.
Because the narrator would have to stop dunking madeleines in tea and being neurasthenic long enough to kick some ass. Though probably Albertine would do the ass-kicking, and the narrator would just watch in admiration. So it wouldn't really be all that different from what it is now.

Comments

[studiesinlight.livejournal.com]

>"Though probably Albertine would do the ass-kicking, and the narrator would just watch in admiration."

This made me laugh. Thank you.

I saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on the library shelf, stared at it, and walked away hoping the trend would end soon.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Yay for you being amused by my Proust joke! :-))))

That one's at least written by the guy who started the trend, but . . . yeah. I adore P&P&Z but I don't need to keep reading the same concept again and again and I really wonder at the publishing industry leaning so heavily on something that's . . . amusing once.

Although to be fair to AL:VH, I have a minicollection of vampire/supernatural books featuring the Romantic poets. But they're just begging for that treatment, and people have been writing them for years, not jumping on the trend-wagon.

[lesbiassparrow.livejournal.com]

I didn't get finish than 4 chapters of P&P and Zombies. The idea was hilarious, but not sadly IMO hilarious enough for an entire book; it's like watching those SNL skits become films. I can't imagine how it spins out into an entire genre of books.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

I thought he did it remarkably seamlessly, though after awhile there were too many frat-boy-movie type jokes. But why the entire publishing industry would decide that the joke wouldn't wear thin *really fast* even for those who were amused the first time makes me wonder less how publishing is in such bad shape and more about how it's managed to survive this long . . .

[lesbiassparrow.livejournal.com]

Why they think anyone needs or would buy a hardback of any of these is beyond me. Do I really need a copy of 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer' that will last the ages that much?

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I read P&P&Z, and it wasn't nearly seamless enough for me. *shrugs* I could see how it COULD have been done seamlessly, and that just made it worse. Thus, not tempted by the also-rans.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Several Austen scholars I know disagree with you on that, is all I'll say. Towards the end too much frat boy humor leaches in, but . . . .

[cissa.livejournal.com]

OK. Now, I did think he did a good job of integrating Jane's illness, and the whole Collins/Charlotte subplot, into his world.

I guess my complaints are not as much with the text per se as the world-building. The frat boy humor- which started pretty early on- is a sign of this. But: the world, as described, just didn't work. Sometimes the girls had serious responsibilities from the Crown; however, they seemed to be able to abandon them whenever that was convenient- not to mention that there was no compensation for these duties, as there would have been. Sometimes ALL girls, pre-marriage, were required to be zombie-slayers; but other girls were not thus required; which is it? But mostly- the high degree of physical prowess and responsibility that was sometimes (though sometimes not) required from unmarried girls could not but help change enough aspects of society that the original P&P structure could not survive- at least, not without a lot more explanation than we got, since our author preferred bloody mayhem to making sense of this dichotomy.

So, I thought the whole thing was fairly clever (except for the frat-boy jokes which were so utterly UNseamless that they were grating and threw me out of the narrative), but not well thought through, particularly with the world-building.

In alternate history, the world building is one of the most important aspects. And this is why I am reluctant to read anything else of this ilk or by this author; I suspect the others are even less coherent.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

that's way more serious critique than I can imagine attaching to this text! (Although mortalwombat731 used it in a college lit class this year.) I think that might be the thing: if you're looking for alternate history, this isn't it. But if you're like me and have reread the book a zillion times, and have thought a lot about the limitations placed on women in Austen's culture . . .

Elizabeth Bennet is a ninja just sounds so damn good. It's pure joy, not logic at all.

But I'm not reading any of the others, 'cause one was enough.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

It occurred to me after I wrote this that many Austen scholars are probably not also sf/f fans, so the problems with the world-building would not be as obvious to them as they are to me (and some other sf/f fans I've read).

I love the idea of Lizzie kicking butt! however- it was a problem for me that this did not seem plausible because the world in which it happened couldn't work, and that threw me out of the joy. :)

Not to mention the frat-boy humor, which Jane would NOT have approved!

ETA: in short, I read it both as a romp- which is was OK at- and as an alternate history, at which it did rather poorly and which was not at all seamless in integrating the JA P&P world with the new, zombie-slaying riff on it.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Not entirely true -- there's a reason fandom and academia have a big overlap. (My sf/f/h book club is 3/7ths literature academics.) But again, it sounds like you're reading the book as part of one genre -- alternate history -- and I am reading it as another -- satire and playfulness -- and expectations are just different. Fair enough? Clearly you're not going to understand my pleasure in it, and I'm not going to understand taking it seriously enough to be concerned with the worldbuilding. Which is ok.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I think I do understand your pleasure in it, though. It would have been much more pleasurable for me if he had treated it more like a work of fiction, and less like a gimmick.

I didn't exactly formulates these thoughts as I was reading it; I just kept getting jerked out of the story by various details. I was expecting to like it! I'd read a lot of good things about it.

I guess I don't see that some degree of coherence is world-building is incompatible with a satire, or a farce, or a romp; for me, a basic coherence makes such MORE fun.

I guess I do take my reading seriously, albeit not in the academic sense. I like even my light fun reads to not throw me out of the story with incoherence or inconsistency. And I do like thinking about why books that work, work, and why ones that don't, don't (for me).

I think it's interesting that when I posted about it before, severel other avid but non-academic readers found some of the same flaws in it that I saw. It would not surprise me if academics are trained to read in a way that is very different than the way we amateurs do!

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

This is why almost every book on Goodreads ends up in the 3.something range -- it's rare to find a book that opinions don't vary *widely* on.

I'd suggest that academics are used to reading in two different modes: total attentiveness to detail when we're "on" and then being able to flip a switch and turn it off so that we *can* actually read for pleasure. For example, with my recent steampunk geekiness I decided I wanted to resurrect a project I'd done on The Difference Engine back in grad school. I have a hardcover, but I can't use it for this because *i need to write all over it* since I'm reading it for a potential paper, so I can't do it until I get a paperback. That's "on" mode. ;-)

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

OK, I just answered the first version of this.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, now I'm envisioning the scene where Jo March brings Beth in extremis to a local vampire for her immortal conversion. Look out, kittens! Yet nothing I can imagine would liven up prissy old Meg.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Not vampires, werewolves.

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Women-Werewolves-Louisa-Alcott/dp/0345522605/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273432607&sr=1-1

I'm just curious how they got there that fast. The author of P&P&Z was a friend of a friend and apparently everyone he knew was sworn to secrecy because it is so high-concept. But these things seem to have been churned out nearly overnight.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Er, actually a friend of a friend of a friend, I should have said. Four degrees of . . . something.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Speaking of four degrees, when was the last time you saw an author cite her Associate's degree in her CV. Makes you wanna howl.

[valancy-s.livejournal.com]

In fact, it's not just the werewolves. Little Women got two.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Ah hah! That one didn't come up when I fed in "Little Women" . . . but I'm so not surprised.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Marcel is convinced that Albertine is being seduced away by a lesbian vampire cabal, little suspecting she's actually a vampire slayer! I'd read that. All 6000 pages of it. (I've been thinking about asking for Proust crackfic for yuletide this year, actually, maybe this is a doable plot...)

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Albertine = Kennedy

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

THIS IS SO SO TRUE AND ALSO WIN \O/

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

Waiting for Ghostdot? I have to say, the video trailer for S&S and Sea Monsters was pretty funny, but I kind of felt that, bookwise, it was a one-joke premise and I'd already had my giggle.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I opted out because I saw too much time and money which could go to *real* books disappearing down that sinkhole. ;-)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I often feel that my Eternal Punishment will be to churn out Henry James Action Figures. (Although the Bronte Transformers are awesomecakes!)

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

They are, indeed!

[mortalwombat731.livejournal.com]

I ended my world lit class last week with P&P&Z, which ended up being eminently teachable, but one of the things we discussed (in a rather fantastic discussion of pastiche and trend) was the various bandwagons: these mash-ups, funnier in concept than in execution after the first one, and also the tremendous upswing in the popularity of the walking dead.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a great final class discussion! Were most of your students familiar with P&P, either reading it or at least seeing a version? Or was this new material to many of them?

[mortalwombat731.livejournal.com]

Luckily, quite a few of them had taken a friend's Close Reading class, where they read Northanger Abbey, so they knew Austen if not P&P. It was really fun --good teacher note to end on!

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

BTW, I pulled out the folder with my years-ago conference paper on The Difference Engine. It's not really salvageable/transformable but it *did* suggest some other avenues to me. Once I've done my reread, I'd love to talk to you about it, since I know you've been immersed it in recently. Dorky academic thing: I have a hardcover and since I can't bring myself to write in it, I ordered a pb from Paperbackswap. And I want to scrawl all over it. so . . . soon.

[valancy-s.livejournal.com]

I think the most improbable one I've seen so far was a War of the Worlds + somethingorother. Because it's so hilarious to add supernatural creatures to a book about an ALIEN INVASION? Ooo, good thinking there...

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the concept is fraying a bit there, definitely.

[kittyjosephine.livejournal.com]

And today, P&P&Z the graphic novel is being released.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Because we must leap on this trend and pound the life out of it for all we are worth.

Hmm, is this trend the zombie?

I saw a P&P&Z postcard book the other day, in St. Mark's Bookshop, which is a pretty snooty place (I was there to buy a theory book on postmodernism by a Marxist scholar, put it that way).