Smash hit

“Most people try to ignore the fact that Austen’s novels are sort of acid baths,” says Brad Pasanek, an assistant professor of literature at the University of Virginia. “She’s so much better, deeper, more sensitive and intelligent than everyone around her that she has to regulate her own misanthropy. Her novels are hostile environments.”

Grahame-Smith says he couldn’t help wondering whether Austen may herself have left premonitions of zombies lurking in her delightful prose. “There’s this militia camped near Meryton,” he points out. “They are there for the young Bennet girls to flirt with, but apart from that, what are they doing there? It’s never really explained. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine they are there to fight the unmentionable menace. And in the original, there’s so much walking to and from places. Or riding. Those scenes provide such an opportunity for zombie attacks.”

Grahame-Smith quickly realised he had to keep the main characters and relationships. “The original is such a brilliantly plotted piece of writing that if you start unravelling things, everything unravels. Obviously, the central relationship — Darcy and Elizabeth — works out, but the way they see their relationship and the way they choose to spend their time together is very different. That said, I do change the fates of some important characters, and some meet with grisly ends. At least one major character slowly becomes a zombie in the course of the book.”

How delicious.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is published by Quirk Books at £8.99

Louis Wise on The Austen Industry

Forget zombies: Austen will soon be contending with aliens, in the film Pride and Predator, funded by Elton John; and vampires, in Michael Thomas Ford’s novel Jane Bites Back. Pride and Prejudice will become a Marvel Comic this year (Marvel has been here before: the Dashwood sisters have hobnobbed with the Fantastic Four) and has been summarised as a series of Facebook updates (“Elizabeth Bennet is ??!!”), not to mention having been staged as a musical several times — a new version should hit Broadway in 2010. The highlight? Lydia Bennet’s I Can’t Resist a Redcoat. Emma, meanwhile, has been updated to The Importance of Being Emma: in Juliet Archer’s novel, our heroine works in marketing, Harriet Smith is her PA and Knightley is in organics. Amanda Grange has given the men’s side of the story, including Edmund Bertram’s Diary (yawn). You can tuck all your Austen trash into your I Mr Darcy tote — your Austen action figure, Elizabeth and Darcy guest soaps and Jane Austen: Reading Is Sexy T-shirt.

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