Pride and Prejudice and not a single zombie in sight

2 years ago I complained that the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was basically Pride and Prejudice, but with zombies thrown into the more boring plot points of the book:

[...] while the twist of having the story set during some zombie plague is definitely interesting, the impression I'm getting so far is that the zombies feel less like a clever plot device and more like a small recurring joke weaved into the boring bits of the story.

I mean, zombies are mostly encountered during what I imagine in the original novel as uneventful trips between towns/estates, and/or are only given a few paragraphs in which they appear. Within those paragraphs the zombies quickly get dispatched by our heroine Miss Bennett, and then the story continues as if nothing happened.

I then came to the conclusion that I was tricked into reading a sugar-coated Pride and Prejudice, proceeded to curse the publishers for their ploy, and then held the notion ever since those days that I now know the plot of the actual Pride and Prejudice.

Well, this week I found some proof to support my conclusion.

Evidence stamp

The Lizzie Bennet diaries (dot Tumblr dot com...) is the home for the vlog of one Elizabeth Bennet, chronicling the days of her life with her best friend Charlotte, younger sister Lydia, older sister Jane, a mother whose sole goal in life is to get her daughers wed, and her encounters with a guy called 'Darcy'.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's because it's Pride and Prejudice for 2012.

The vlog and Tumblr started just a month ago so it didn't take long for me to watch all the videos posted thus far. After each video I came away with the thought of, Huh, this is surprisingly accurate. You know why I know it's accurate? Because I read the damn zombie version of the book that does nothing to the original story.

(Yeah, you can tell I'm still bitter about having bought that book.)

If you really want to know what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is like but don't want to submit yourself to the pain of having to actually read the thing, then just watch The Lizzie Bennet diaries and imagine that after each video, every character you're introduced to fights off a horde of zombies, then dusts themselves off (and cleans up any and all evidence of the mayhem that occurred) just in time for the next video.

Does watching that next video seem like nothing zombie-related happened at all? Perfect! That's exactly how the book feels.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains..." whoops, wrong story.