"I told him it was the most brilliant idea I'd ever heard." He called Seth Grahame-Smith, an LA-based television writer, who takes up the story in his introduction to the new edition. "Once I drew a line between Pride and Prejudice and zombies, I knew I had a title," he said in a recent interview.
Inspired by the "creative copyright violations" abounding in other genres, with people conflating songs, film trailers or television shows on websites such as YouTube, he began compiling a list of classic works of literature in the public domain which might benefit from an influx of pop culture figures such as pirates, ninjas or zombies. The original idea was the brainchild of Jason Rekulak, an editor at Quirk Books, a tiny independent publishing house based in Philadelphia. It has just been reprinted in an illustrated deluxe gift edition for the Christmas market ("now with 30% more zombies!") and has, naturally, spawned its own legion of imitators keen to jump on the bandwagon. First published in the spring, the book immediately became a New York Times bestseller, with more than 700,000 copies sold worldwide to date, and film rights bought up by Hollywood. Literary-horror "mash-ups" are probably the strangest trend to have landed in our bookshops this year, led by the phenomenon of Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk £8.99, pp320). For an enterprising publisher, therefore, there was really only one solution: give Austen's characters a new lease of life by splicing them with another, equally popular genre.
While the public appetite for Austen remains unsated, she herself remains stubbornly unable to produce any more in the series. (It is a further truth that anyone writing about Austen must begin with a variant of that sentence.) Even the relentless adaptations machine, which seems to produce remakes of her best-known novels while the previous remake is still in post-production, finds itself necessarily constrained by the fact that Austen wrote only six complete books, of which one – Pride and Prejudice – is by far the best known. I t is a truth universally acknowledged that a brand as successful and limited as the Jane Austen industry must be in want of diversification.
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