Fear... can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.

- Philip K. Dick

The world is rapidly shrinking.  As more satellites are launched and civilization continues to spread about the globe, it's getting harder to find any true mysteries left unsolved.  The age of exploration and adventure seems dead and forgotten.  Or is it?

In Benjamin Parzybok's debut novel, Couch, three twenty-somethings embark on an epic quest that takes them from their apartment in Portland, OR to the furthest reaches of myth and human experience.  Along the way they meet attractive journalists, steampunk enthusiasts, nefarious collectors, helpful councils, drunken guerillas and many others.  For it seems like the couch has a destination in mind, somewhere that it wants to go, and it's up to the three roommates to ensure it arrives there.

What makes the book interesting isn't it's seemingly unique premise - though the idea of an act of furniture moving expanding into an epic quest of identity is certainly intriguing.  What makes the readers follow along in the story are the three main characters - Thom, Tree and Eric - each with something off about them, and each with a carefully formed personality that intensifies and/or undergoes some changes in the course of the journey.

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I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

-Franz Kafka

...why did we wait for any thing?--why not seize the pleasure at once?--How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!

- Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Austen inspires two very different reactions within me. 

While I'm reading her books, I find them tedious and rather obnoxious.  Spending so much time in the minutiae and social mores of the upper class of an uptight society - whilst the rest of the country experienced terrible problems with the rise of the industrial revolution - it's a bit reminiscent of the popular, pretty girl in high school bitching about how she can be alone...even in a crowd (which may be why I still hate Clueless - itself based on Austen's Emma).

And yet - as with most things in this life, a good teacher can make all the difference.  For I found, under the genius tutelage of the beautiful & brilliant Professor Priscilla Gilman, that there were multiple levels to Austen's work.  Metaphors, figurative language and whole characters created as a means of commenting on the very society and cultural norms I found so detestable.

Reading Austen was tedious and arduous to me - but thinking about her work was exciting and revelatory.  Enter Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, which isn't a complete 180 on my previous experience with Austen, but was very close to it.

PPZ:DOD (for brevity sake) is the prequel to Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, although this book is written by Steve Hockensmith, not Grahame-Smith.  And while the previous entry in the series was a reworking and interweaving of Austen's text with Grahame-Smith's own injection of zombie action, this tale isn't fettered by Austen's plots, allowing Hockensmith to become much more creative.

Sometimes such freedom can be dangerous, if not outright dreadful (some pun intended).  Without the structure provided by Austen's work, it would be easy to see how PPZ:DOD could go off the rails.  However, Hockensmith has crafted a fun tale with plenty of (nerdy) genre shout-outs and perhaps even a certain level of profundity, though not at the expense of his entertaining book.  If Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a novel entry that helps redefine a genre while constantly providing some sort of metaphor, then consider PPZ:DOD more like Shaun of the Dead - highly entertaining and amusing revisionist romp, with plenty of geeky allusions and meta-textual moments, and perhaps a slight dipping of its toe into social commentary.  Heck, there's even discussion in PPZ:DOD about using "the zed word."

More review after the jump, along with a chance to win FABULOUS prizes!

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Thom tried to think of someone who had saved the world and felt suddenly the world was short of world-saving heroes.  Perhaps saving the world was impossible unless you were the fellow who refused to press the big red button when the time came.  There were millions of heroes, each saving a very small part of the world.

- Couch by Benjamin Parzybok

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

- Voltaire

Looking at you, Taylor Momsen.

Don't be like her - have a soul and please continue to contribute to Haitian relief efforts!

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

-Dorothy Parker



"When you walked a city, wherever you looked, someone had probably fallen in love there."

- Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

In the din of fireworks and native drums, of colored lights in the doorways and the clamor of the crowd yearning for peace, Florentino Ariza wandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watching the fiesta through his tears, dazed by the hallucination that it was he and not God who had been born that night. 

-- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

…I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

-- On the Road by Jack Kerouac