Too many zombies
Continuing again on the subject of books, but back to the one about zombies, I made the judgement that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was lacking in zombies. In my own mind I extended this opinion to the genre as a whole - the 'insert-zombies-here' genre - but I may have jumped the gun on that one. You see, while waiting for the doors to Kick-Ass to open (an awesome movie by the way; everyone who meets the age requirement should go see it), I stumbled across this while perusing the shelves at the nearby Whitcoulls:
If the image isn't clear enough for you to see, the title of that book is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Reading the blurb on the book reveals that it is a prequel to the events of the original parody, set several years before, when the zombie plague that seems to have taken hold of English society was just starting.
When I saw that book, I started to think that the publishers were really milking the whole idea - much like how the market seems to be flooded with vampire romance books a la the Twilight series. But then when I got home and tried to find the title on Amazon, I found that the Jane Austen + monsters 'genre' was far from alone.
The search results listed a book which re-wrote the Robin Hood tale to have him and Friar Tuck be zombie killers, another book gave Huckleberry Finn a zombie partner-in-crime, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was given a good dose of mummies, and The Wizard of Oz became The Undead World of Oz.
Without having to be tied-down to any original text, Dawn has the potential to be funnier for me than Pride, but as soon as I saw those search results, I was hit with zombie fatigue.
I'm tired of everyone trying to insert zombies into things to try make a quick buck or extend the life of some long-dead idea. Adding the undead to something doesn't necessarily make it more alive! Sure I've only read 1 'insert-zombies-here' book, but the gamer side of me can give you a laundry list of zombie titles that I really don't think are worth the megabytes of storage on your disk drive or the DVDs they are printed on.
My pet peeve, Call of Duty: World at War, has Nazi zombies in them... NAZI ZOMBIES! It's bad enough that developers have been churning out WWII games longer than WWII itself has lasted, but then to insert zombies into them to get that little bit of post-mortem movement from a dead horse that's already been beaten more times than a drum is a kind of necromancy that should be as illegal as necrophilia.
On that note, if by some crazy circumstances the real zombie plague just happens to start because somebody was screwing over that horse (or any other idea-corpse) too hard because they already inserted zombies into everything, then they deserve to have their brains eaten-out by that exact same corpse when it turns into a zombie.
There'd be a certain irony to that.
Update: From the blog of sci-fi author, John Scalzi:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, adapted by Tony Lee, Illustrated by Cliff Richards (Del Rey)
Really? I mean, come on, now, guys. Really? Also: Really? Out May 4.
