Category: review

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith: D-


From the back cover:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read.

Review:
The plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is generally well known. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy meet, do not get along, form incomplete and incorrect notions of each other, see the error of their ways, and eventually end up living happily ever after. To this scenario, add some zombies, toilet humor, and a whole lot of innuendo and you have Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Except that’s not entirely true, because somehow by adding more, Seth Grahame-Smith has robbed the original of nearly every bit of charm it possesses.

The version I read was the deluxe heirloom edition, which, in evident response to criticism about insufficient zombie presence, includes “new words, lines, paragraphs, and all-new scenes of ultraviolent mayhem throughout.” The black-and-white illustrations of the original edition have also been replaced by color paintings. Judging by what I’ve seen of the former, this is a vast improvement, even though Elizabeth looks to be wearing the same white gown throughout the entire novel. In the preface, Grahame-Smith describes how he came to be involved in the project (he was unfamiliar with the novel until the idea was suggested, and this definitely shows) as well as how he wrote it by obtaining an electronic copy of Austen’s novel and inserting his own text (appropriately colored red), vowing to change at least one thing on every page. Sometimes the changes are indeed just a word here or there, and sometimes entire excursions to a nearby village to fend off some “manky dreadfuls” are shoehorned in between two paragraphs. Not content to merely add text, Grahame-Smith seems to delight in removing it, as well. Among the casualties are many of the cleverest examples of Austen’s snark, especially those that reveal character, like when Austen writes of Mr. Bingley’s sisters that they “indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of their dear friend’s vulgar relations.”

To fit the story, the characters have changed as well. Some—like Jane and Mr. Collins—manage to emerge essentially unaltered, but the leads are very different. Elizabeth is bloodthirsty, quick to consider violence as a response to dishonor, and at one point yanks out the still-beating heart of a ninja she has just defeated and takes a bite. Ew! Darcy not only has zombie-fighting prowess, he’s now a lecherous git. He’s scandalously rude to Miss Bingley, whose transparent advances he fended off in the original with implacable politeness, and often makes lewd remarks, like, “On the contrary, I find that balls are much more enjoyable when they cease to remain private.” Again I say, “Ew!” I used to adore this couple and now I don’t like either of them! Other crass (and needless) adjustments find both Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Gardiner engaged in extramarital affairs, Mrs. Bennet afflicted with recurring bouts of nerve-induced vomiting, and Wickham grievously injured seemingly for no other purpose than to allow for repeated references to his newfound incontinence.

By and large, the zombie encounters are boring and pointless. In this regard, I think Grahame-Smith might actually have been better served by altering the story even further. If the undead menace had progressed to such an extent that our protagonists were forced to undertake a final climactic battle, for example, then their presence might’ve been leading up to something. As it is, the biggest effect the zombies have on the plot is in providing explanations for the sudden departure of Bingley’s party after the Netherfield ball and Charlotte Lucas’ acceptance of a marriage proposal from Mr. Collins. Grahame-Smith invents a number of “dear friends” of the Bennets to serve as zombie fodder, but these passages—like the Christmas visit from an entire zombified family—are so embarrassingly banal I truly hope nobody reading this book without foreknowledge of the original thinks Austen’s work contained anything similar.

To sum up: this is exceedingly awful. Grahame-Smith butchers the characters of Pride and Prejudice more effectively than a horde of zombies ever could. I would almost go so far as to say that I outright hated it, but every so often, an untouched bit of Austen would shine through the muck and make me smile for an instant. Now I’m going to try very hard to forget I ever read this.

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J’s Take on Heat Wave by Richard Castle


Well, what to make of this book. Heat Wave is written by fictional character, Richard Castle, from the television show, Castle. That’s not even quite the weird part. The book is also pretty much an episode of the television show, just with all the characters slightly changed. Any real author basing a novel so much on real life is likely going to be in a load of trouble with his family and friends.

Let’s.. take this in chunks:

The Writing

I had trouble getting into this book at first. As in, I had trouble at a very basic level in comprehension. It was making my brain hurt. Somewhere along the line, it got easier. I’m inclined to say that the writing got better, but it could simply be that I got used to it. I’m not quite sure, but I do have some examples, and the examples are from early on.

Metaphors and other bits of language that make you stop. And yea, they make you think, and yea, they can be a bit humorous. But they also make you stop. It interrupts the flow.

Page 1: “the tourists were […] seeking refuge in Starbucks over iced drinks ending in vowels.”
Page 3: “Rook had curled his hands to form skin binoculars”
Page 32: “what looked to her like an escalator to the basement painted red” — to describe a graph

Character name switches. She’s Nikki Heat. She’s Heat. She’s Detective Heat. She’s ‘the detective’. Just when you think the author(s) has finalized on Heat and is going to stick with it, out comes another Nikki Heat or just Nikki. And of course it happens with other characters as well. Sometimes trying to give us information by doing it, like ‘her friend’. As if we couldn’t gather that by context.

Number problems. It happened more than once. Here’s one from page 15: “Two thousand six scrape with a bouncer in SoHo; 2008, you pushed a guy […]” Did some style rulebook tell you not to start a sentence with a number? Because it’s just plain silly to say 2006 and 2008 in two different ways. Plus just silly to give a year that way in the first place.

Maybe an editor should’ve caught that? problems — page 33

“I see,” he said. And then he took the plunge. “Matthew Starr indulged some personal habits that compromised his personal fortune. He did damage.” Noah paused then took the plunge.

At one point, I had trouble following who was speaking, but looking back through, I can’t find where that was.

There were also times where something was mentioned and I had to try to remember what it was referring to. Specifically the ‘perfume ad’. If you weren’t paying attention the first time Heat’s internal monologue came up with that, you were lost. And since I was already overwhelmed with metaphors and odd little references, I did miss that the first time.

The whole feel of it, especially the dialogue, was quite like the show. If you’re not paying attention, you’re going to miss a quip. Even if you are paying attention, you’ll probably miss some quips. Or my geek repetoire is not geeky enough in the right directions (music, old movies, etc) to get everything.

The Characters

So instead of Castle, the bestselling novelist, we have Rook, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. Who is somehow also fabulously rich. And instead of whatever her name is, the detective on the show, we have Nikki Heat. Who you can reasonably read into as Castle’s impression of who the detective on the show is, whatever her name is. And other characters map as well, including 2 detectives or cops or whatever who do the girl detective’s bidding, but competently. Unlike some shows.

And, inexplicably, Castle/Rook’s mother, the diva. She shows up briefly in one scene, and her appearance was utterly pointless.

The characters are so like the television show, that I was brought up short every time we were reminded that Rook is a journalist. I guess he didn’t fit my image of a journalist. Wise-cracking, risk-taking, devil may care journalist? And, again, rich?

A book written by Castle?

Well, I can sort of see it. At first, I was reading it in my head in Nathan Fillion’s Castle voice, though eventually that dropped off. And yea, you can totally see a guy like him writing a hot detective chick parading around her apartment naked and then kicking butt in that state.

But then I think.. well, a real novelist.. well, a) wouldn’t map his life so closely like that, and b) should know his main character better. That is, I never really felt like I was inhabiting Nikki Heat. So I never felt like the author was either. But I guess that isn’t necessarily indicative of ‘not a real author’, but more of ‘not a very good author’.

Whoa, trippy man

The quote from the back of the book: “Rick Castle must have been doing his research because Nikki Heat has the unmistakable ring of truth.” — It actually got me thinking.. how many things on the show do we see Castle learning about that made it into the book? And I don’t know the answer to that, because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the first season of Castle. Are there clever little things like that?

Summary

Interesting to read for what it is, though if it wasn’t what it is, I wouldn’t have read it. And if I had read it, I would’ve put it down. Because I would’ve found it rather dull. Reading all these mysteries is just confirming to me that I’m not particularly fond of them. (Ignoring that I did go through a stage in my youth of reading most of Sherlock Holmes.)

The acknowledgements deserve acknowledgement for being interesting and a bit amusing.

I’m giving the book a rather solid 3 (out of 5). An overall impression of ‘meh’, yet the compulsion to want to buy a copy and mark it up in red ink to figure out why I had such problems with its language.

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Heat Wave (Richard Castle)

The Plot
NYPD Detective Nikki Heat has two problems: a dead Donald Trump clone whose murder she has to solve, and a journalist who’s tagging around with her while she does it. Plus, it’s really hot out.

My Thoughts
So here we have a somewhat average modern-day mystery-thriller. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of these sorts of books; I much prefer the type of mystery that is generally referred to as ‘cozy’ or (more accurately) ‘puzzle’. I’m not entirely sure where the cozy is meant to be — murder is not exactly warm and fuzzy even if Jessica Fletcher is the one investigating.

It’s short, hardly worth the cover price at a mere 197 pages. It has a few elements of a caper/humorous sort of mystery (a la Stephanie Plum) but it wants to be more hardcore than that. And if that were all this was, then Heat Wave would be pretty readily dismissible, an okay book in a crowded genre, devoured by a few and just as quickly forgotten.

But Heat Wave has a slightly more interesting pedigree: its author, Richard Castle, is himself a fictional character on the television show Castle. So it must be evaluated on this second level as well, as an offshoot of the fictional New York City established in the Castle universe.

For anyone unfamiliar with the television series, the premise is that the best-selling author Richard Castle, friends with the mayor of New York, wants to start writing a new series starring a female detective as his lead character. Through his friendship with the mayor he is given the privilege of tagging around with a NYPD detective. A hot female detective. His new character will be based upon her. Their relationship is defined by banter, some of it friendly, some of it not so friendly, some of it flirty, some of it not so flirty. He uses his authorial contacts and imagination to help her fight crime, she puts up with him and the fact that he bestowed upon his new character the porn-star name Nikki Heat.

Looking at the book as if one is living in the Castle-verse, there is more of interest: not so much the plot, but the subtext. Though Castle and Beckett are not romantically involved on the show (and one hopes the writers are smart enough to avoid allowing this to happen in the future), Castle’s self-insert book character, Jameson Rook (ha ha), manages to do some self-inserting with Nikki well before the mystery wraps up. Does this mean Castle secretly (or not so secretly) wants Beckett? Is he just showing her what she’s missing out on? Is it all a big fake out? Who knows. But it’s this sort of meta-pondering that made the book interesting and not the fairly tired plot. (I mean, come on — the identity of the ultimate criminal was a cliche. It could hardly have been more obvious.)

In Short
For fans of the television series Castle, this book is really a must read. It adds a new depth to the characters (Richard’s especially) and raises questions which can now be examined on the show now that it’s received a full second season order. For fans of mystery-thrillers, eh. By no means is this bad; it’s a decent representative of its type — but it is also very short. I don’t know if there are plans to continue the Nikki Heat series in the real world (in the Castle world more books have been contracted for), but unless one is watching the show I’m not sure it would be worth getting invested in the characters for a mere 200 pages.

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Point of Hopes (Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett)

The Plot
In the city of Astreiant, children have been disappearing — and not the sort of children that would be expected to run away to seek their fortune. Nico Rathe, adjunct pointsman at Point of Hopes, is determined that his investigation will see the children found before anything can happen to them. But with approximately zero leads, he’s mostly just poking around and hoping something pops out. Meanwhile, the city is growing more tense and hostilities are starting to break out.

My Thoughts
This wasn’t a book I’d picked out, and I again had a curious reluctance to pick it up and start it. But unlike the last book where that happened, once I got going with it I didn’t really have trouble continuing.

On its surface, this seems like a book I would like very much: I’m a fan of mysteries and I’m a fan of fantasy and this one has both. The surface impression is not entirely wrong, either.

The book’s main character, Nico Rathe, is the adjunct point in the area of Astreiant called Point of Hopes. It’s clear immediately that a ‘point’ is a sort of patrolman and detective rolled into one. But at that point (ha ha) the worldbuilding breaks down a little, and information is not provided as quickly as I desired it. First, I found that I was confused about the geography: I initially thought that Point of Hopes was a town and all these other places mentioned were also towns, all within the country of Astreiant. But that was a mistaken impression. Instead, Point of Hopes, Point of Dreams and so forth are actually neighborhoods within the city of Astreiant which is in the kingdom (queendom) of Chenedolle. I didn’t figure this out until about halfway through the book, at which point some things started making a good deal more sense.

There was also confusion with vocabulary. Now, it’s the prerogative of fantasy writers to make up new words for their new worlds, and I have nothing against that. The danger of made-up vocabulary, however, is a failure to adequately define a term in context. The authors mostly avoided this pitfall with one glaring exception. The world ‘point’ seemed to refer to the policemen, locations, the charges which were being filed and was just flung around far too freely for me to keep track of its meaning. The point at the point made a point on the point to pointy point point.

Setting these issues aside, the mystery gets underway quickly, with Rathe interviewing people to find out more information about what’s going on. As his investigation stalls, tensions begin to rise within the city, and the cityfolk let their fears dictate their actions — they become suspicious of outsiders and inclined to violence. It’s mostly due to this that Rathe encounters the unemployed soldier Eslingen and decides to use him as a mole within the household of someone his boss’s boss has decided to finger as a suspect in the disappearances.

The mystery continues at a very slow burn until the last quarter of the book when the pace picks up, some vital information is finally shaken loose, and things race to a conclusion. While I found the final confrontation anti-climactic, it didn’t seem inconsistent with anything that had been established earlier in the book and was all right.

My main lingering complaint after the end of the book was a definite lack of information that was conveyed about the world. It was clear from the details that did emerge the authors had done some thinking about the world and how its mechanics operated. But they were very stingy with their revelations! For instance, we are told throughout the course of the book that in this world, astrology is real, and the stars of your birth can have a significant impact on your odds of success or failure in certain professions. But though this was actually a major plot point, I still felt, by the end, I didn’t understand precisely how this worked.

There are also hints that homosexuality, particularly among the young, is accepted and even encouraged. There are indications that inheritance in this world is through the female line, with daughters being the first to inherit. The world is fairly equal, most likely as a direct result of the inheritance laws not requiring men to assure themselves of their sons being fathered by themselves. Ghosts are real. But none of this is detailed or explored — it’s all just an aside.

There is a sequel, which presumably would expand on the world and provide a deeper look at some of these issues, but I think this book could have been made better by the inclusion of just a little more time, a few more pages, put into explaining the setting.

In Short
As a mystery, it wasn’t bad. It worked a great deal like other mysteries set in the distant past (Death Comes as the End), in a distant location (Rowland’s Sano Ichiro series), or in an alternate Earth (Garrett’s Lord Darcy series). In other words, the mystery itself was not really ‘fair’ in that you couldn’t necessarily solve it before the investigator due to a lack of information about the setting — but on the other hand, the solution was not convoluted because of the lack of need to obscure the clues. As a fantasy, I felt like the worldbuilding had clearly been done, but that information wasn’t conveyed to the reader in as much depth as I wanted it. It was a slow read, but I did like it.

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Memories of the Future, Volume One (Wil Wheaton)

The Plot
For many shows, the first season is a season of finding the right voice and settling in; of characters who are still in development and premises that are still undergoing revision. This was the case for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wil Wheaton, a cast member, revisits his memories of the making of the first half of the first season, evaluating the episodes from the perspective of 20 years.

My Thoughts
When I was very small, I had an irrational prejudice against certain shows and movies. I quite liked Star Wars, but I was anti-Indiana Jones, anti-TOS, anti-Doctor Who and anti-Battlestar Galactica for reasons I can’t now remember.

All the same, I don’t remember protesting at all when my dad took myself and my brother to see ST4 at the movie theatre. The rarity of such an outing cannot be overstated: I can’t remember a time before or after (until we became near adults) that my dad willingly took both of us to the movies by himself. I assume my mother had flatly refused to see this movie and my dad, not willing to appear so very selfish as to head out and see it on his own, decided we would be reasonable camoflage. And really, if you had to pick a Trek movie to which you should take two elementary school kids, ST4 is the one. By osmosis, I knew enough about the characters to identify them by name, but very little more than that (the significance of the end of the movie, where the Enterprise-A is revealed, was lost on me.)

Somehow, in between viewing ST4 and the arrival of TNG on television, I became a fan. Not of TOS (that came later still), but of the idea of Star Trek. I was SO EXCITED there was going to be a new one. I was worried (and cynically sure, even at age 11) that it would soon be cancelled. There were girls! Three of them! and a kid! (A boy, sadly, but I will rant about that later) and the guy from Reading Rainbow! By the time TNG ended, 7 years later, I was about to leave for college, I was an unabashed fan of all things Star Trek, Doctor Who, and I’d found a few sci-fi authors to follow as well.

Star Trek, and especially TNG, was a big part of my life for a lot of years. I watched it faithfully: new episodes, which were in first-run syndication, could be viewed at four different times during the week on a couple of different channels (five, if you count the station that only came in with much squinting and tinkering with the antenna). Older episodes were rerun at 6pm and at 7pm every weekday night. And I tuned in about 99% of the time.

Wheaton, who, as people (everybody?) know, played Wesley Crusher on the series, divides his thoughts on each episode into two or three sections. The bulk is found in the synopsis, which will be familiar for anyone who frequented Television Without Pity back before it went all to hell. Wheaton does not spare the snark in evaluating the success of these early episodes, and with his insider knowledge is often able to put his finger on the exact problem, be it the writers, the director, or the powers that be.

At times, I think he was a little hard on both himself and the writers in his reaction to Wesley in these episodes. It’s a fact that Wes annoyed a lot of people, but his presence also served a purpose — he gave kids watching an entry point, a character with which to identify, and helped to create a new generation of Star Trek fans. As an 11 year old, I didn’t find him annoying, and I found his behavior perfectly reasonable. The show lost something when Wheaton made his departure, and even though the later seasons were far stronger than the first two, I still wish there had been a better resolution for the Wesley character before Trek went off the air. (With all the time travel that was going on, he could totally have showed up on Enterprise…)

I also liked his insider’s view of the episodes, the bits he remembered from production and encounters with the guest stars. This is the kind of stuff that you don’t usually hear about (Wheaton has written several production diaries in the past couple of years when he’s guest starred on other shows, and this is the same sort of thing.) It also helps to drive home the work that’s involved in the creation of these shows that appear magically on our televisions. I know I can’t be the only one who has a difficult time thinking of acting as hard work requiring lots of training and effort, and as he’s done before, Wheaton really brings that side of things to life.

In Short
The whole idea for this book was brilliantly conceived, and I really hope that rather than stop at season one, Wheaton continues through and does the rest of the seasons in which he was involved (plus the handful of episodes where he was a guest after he stopped being a regular). I’m a sucker for snarky show recaps, especially ones as well done as these. Could have spared a bit of the OMG the writers! It was all the writers! [who made Wes obnoxious!] but overall this was great and I can’t wait for the next one.

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