Dawn of the Dreadfuls

Dawn of the Dreadfuls Steve Hockensmith

So, I liked Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I tried Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and didn't get more than 30 pages into it* and overall, I'm more than a little burned out on all of these mashups. The joke's old and it really only worked as a novelty.

But... this isn't a mashup, it's the prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and, dare I say it, even better.

Because Hockensmith isn't shoehorning an alternate plot into an exsisting literary work, he's not constrained by one and so it just works so much better than the mashups..

We start at the church, for a funeral, only the corpse doesn't stay dead for the entire service. Mr. Bennett, one of the only people in Meryton to understand what this means, starts training his daughters in the ways of the warrior. Mrs. Bennett is just concerned about their marriage prospects if they engage in such unladylike behavoirs.

Jane is being foisted onto the lecherous Lord Lumpley. Elizabeth is torn between her martial arts instructor and the scientist who comes to study the zombies.

The zed word gets thrown about rather frequently, unlike in PPZ, and sometimes I disagreed with a character action (not so much of a 'no! don't do that!' but more of a 'dude, Jane would NEVER! Even if there were zombies all over the place!') BUT, overall, I really like what he did the characters and his thoughts about what they'd be like several years younger. I also loved the background information we got-- not only on the previous zombie wars and information about the zombies and how England reacted and what was going on there, but also about the original story. If you ever wondered why all five Bennett girls were out at once or why Netherfield was empty in the first place... well... here's one possible explanation.

Overall, super fun.

*Although that may have been my mood at the time instead of the book.

Book Provided by... my local library

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