Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Zombies are the new vampires

As Fosco noted in an earlier post, the city of Austin was overrun by zombies last weekend. The news was even reported (oddly enough) in the China Daily, which led with this bizarre sentence:

Computer-controlled road signs in the US warned that zombies were ahead after being hacked by pranksters, it has been revealed.
The "it has been revealed" is a very puzzling yet appealing clause, yes? I bet that pretty much sums up news in China: news doesn't happen, it gets revealed.

But anyway, yesterday we learned that there are zombies in yet another Austin: Jane (Austen). According to this piece in the Times, Quirk Books is releasing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:
the book includes the original text of the Regency classic, juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.”
The Times article notes that the famous first line of Austen's classic has been re-written quite well:
We at the Book Review strive to drive a stake through the heart of all reincarnations of Austen’s most famous opening line, but the version in “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is actually pretty good: “It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
Which means that, if you're a literature person, you're already thinking of other famous lines from novels that could be zombified...

Here are Fosco's contributions:
  • "Reader, I ate him." (Zombie Jane Eyre)
  • "It is a far, far better brain that I eat, than I have ever eaten." (A Tale of Two Zombies)
  • "Mrs. Dalloway said she would eat the brains herself." (Zombie Mrs. Dalloway)
  • "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my zombie tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Rrrrgh. So, I called myself Rrrrgh, and came to be called Rrrrgh." (Great Zombie Expectations)
  • "Since Bovary's death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville without any success, so severely did Zombie Homais eat their brains. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him. He has just received the cross of the Zombie Legion of Honour." (Zombie Madame Bovary)
  • "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling
    faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of
    their last end, upon all the dead and the undead." (Joyce's "The Un-Dead")
  • "Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Or is there? The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Except that he wasn't." (A Zombie Christmas Carol)
Try your own--it's fun!

2 comments:

Jill said...

"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'"
The Satanic Verses by
Zombie Rushdie

Don't have to change anything for this one.

FOSCO said...

Well-played.

I love that novel.