I've begun reading the new "phenomenon", Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It is, in a word, dreadful. I'm more than halfway through it, but confident enough at this point to give what I feel is an accurate critique of it. I'll try to give as little spoilers as possible.

In many ways, this pairing of old and new feels as though I'm reading a manuscript written by a pimply, sixteen-year-old boy on the absolute outermost fringes of high school society. Here are the reasons in no particular order:

There are repeated references to vomit, toilet humor, and the worst, plays on words regarding balls. Now, once would have sufficed to say something about "public and private balls" in a juvenile manner, but since it was "funny" once, it has to be "funny" a second or third time, right? Because balls the dances sounds like balls the area DOWN THERE.

Mr. Collins is fat, so why not capitalize on that fact and repeated state how fat he is with unclever jokes and have the characters insult him about his eating habits?

Ninjas and zombies are cool. Why not throw them in? Zombies would have been clever, had they been written right. Ninjas, however... is pushing it. Especially when paired with unwavering descriptions of the most disgusting and violent actions possible. Granted, I could perhaps give it to the author that yes, the Bennets' world was one of extremely civil and polite society, and to contrast it with the most extreme scenes possible is playing off that to shock and bring humor, but the author just does NOT do it well.

Those things aside, it's just not written well. There are the plagiarized sections of Austen that do not gel well with his Olde Tyme sounding prose that, were it to stand alone in a separate novel, simply just wouldn't be good at all, but paired up with the Real Deal, reads even worse.

The actions/behaviors of the characters are always at odds-- he can't seem to make a character be one person. Taking violent offense at something said one minute, while the next being all politeness and thinking of society, as though they were suffering from multiple personalities.

On many occasions, the author feels the need to dumb down Austen's own humor-- in the scene where Mr. Bennett is about to announce that he has, in fact, been to see Mr. Bingley while waiting for his wife to finish berating him for NOT seeing him, the author decides he has to TELL his reading audience what Mr. Bennet's been up to. Why? Why feel the need to let the audience in on the joke before hand, rather than allowing it to be a surprise as much to the reader as to the female Bennets? It's not the only time the author does it, but the most memorable.

And lastly, though it shouldn't matter, the fact that the person who illustrated the novel decided to put the characters in late Victorian era clothing... irks the hell out of me. All one would have to do is take a glance at IMDB to get references from the many, many P & P movies out there for the clothing.

Gah.

In short, it sucked big chunks through a donkey's ear.