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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