Picoreview: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies

[mizkit]

Picoreview: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: startlingly enjoyable!

Look, I won’t kid you. When P&P&Z came out as a book I thought, “*God* I wish I’d thought of that.” It didn’t matter if it was going to be a one-hit wonder (and it apparently was; SENSE & SENSIBILITY & SEAMONSTERS apparently didn’t do nearly as well), it was just such a great idea that

Comments

[pers1stence]

My book club universally disliked the book, but not even enough to want to rip it apart, and wound up watching Shawn of the Dead instead of having a discussion that night. The consensus seemed to be that the book needed -more- new material and to hew a little less closely to the source material, because the new stuff felt awkwardly shoe-horned in.

[mizkit]

That was my impression of the book, in fact. That it had sort of shoved the words "and zombies!" everywhere it could without doing much more than that. "Elizabeth danced with Darcy. And zombies!" :)

The movie, though, does it right!

[pers1stence]

'zactly, "and zombies" wasn't enough for any of us in my book club. there are occasionally stories that make better movies than they do books. i fully expect Room is another one where the movie version can avoid the flaws of the book. In the case of Room, the story is told from inside the head of the small child, but the "voice" didn't ring true for me in the book. But since the movie is inherently not in anyone's head, that dissonance is unlikely to be a problem.