Articles

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Lecture and Discussion with Seth Grahame-Smith at CSUF

On April 23, 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of bestselling classic mash up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies held a lecture and discussion about his book at California State University, Fullerton.  ZWN staff writer and correspondent, Marcel-Jean “Dangermouse” Sarfati, was in attendance to bring you an insight to this “classic” classic novel.  You will also enjoy ZWN’s exclusive interview with Grahame-Smith here.

In high school, Seth Grahame-Smith tried to tackle Pride and Prejudice and hated it. At 14, he couldn’t give a shit about Lizzy and her man troubles; he couldn’t care less about Mr. Darcy and his flowing chestnut mane of hair. Little did he know that he would one day write the bestselling book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a merging of Jane Austen’s classic novel with a new storyline centered on zombie mayhem.  For years, England has been rife with “unmentionables,” and the Bennett girls have become proficient in the deadly arts in order to protect their beloved country from the strange plague.

How does such an awesome, yet obscure idea come about? We have Grahame-Smith’s editor Jason Rekulak to thank for this one. He wanted to do a modern take on a classic, mainly because Grahame-Smith’s publisher, Quirk Books, is a small company and it’s easy to get the rights to classic books because they’re public domain. He called Grahame-Smith excitedly one day and said, “Okay, all I got is this title. I want you to hear me out, I don’t want you to judge. I just want you to listen to this and just wait a minute before you say anything.” Then he said “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!” Without hesitation Seth Grahame-Smith replied, “That is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” In his mind he saw Elizabeth Bennett flying around the room like Trinity from The Matrix. Then it struck him how fun it would be to tackle classic fiction, after all he’d written books on porn – The Big Book of Porn, horror movies – How to Survive a Horror Movie: All the Skills to Dodge the Kills, Spider-man – The Spider-man Handbook, and even our last President – Pardon My President: Fold-and-Mail Apologies for 8 Years of George W. Bush.

He imagined what it would be like to write these gratuitous, ridiculous sequences of gore and violence in the regency style and how fun it would be to mimic, as best as one can mimic, the language of Jane Austen. He wanted to keep the theme of the book intact and the characters and their motivations intact. It wouldn’t make sense for Elizabeth Bennett (“Lizzy”) to be anything else but a fearsome, independent, sharp-tongued girl. All he really had to do was put a dagger in her hand, and instead of verbally sparring with people, she would literally spar with people.

The bestselling potential of the idea was not immediately recognized. Nobody at Quirk Books thought it was a good idea. Their reaction was that the zombies would turn off the Jane Austen people and the Jane Austen would turn off the zombie people and there would be no one left who would want to read the book. Finally the publisher said he could do it, but they wouldn’t spend any money on it and he only had 6 weeks to do it in. So, five and a half weeks later, after spending the first week reading the book again and plotting carefully, he turned in the manuscript and went on with his life.

That was a year ago. Sometime in February, some industrious blogger out there found it on a book list somewhere and started blogging about it. Then other bloggers started blogging about it. Then it started propagating around the internet in the Blogosphere. Then enough Blogosphere action happened that the mainstream media got wind of it.

Grahame-Smith admitted that for the five books that he had previously written, you could count on one hand the number of interviews he had done. Now, with PPZ, all that had changed. All of a sudden his phone started to ring, receiving calls from as far away as London. The London Sunday Times did a feature in which the reporter used the phrase “Hollywood bidding war” about the book, which resulted in Hollywood getting interested.  Natalie Portman has bought the movie rights and the author will soon be meeting with them for discussion, though he says he probably will not write the movie. Also look for the expanded special edition of PPZ, a leather-bound version with thirty percent new manuscript. It will be out by Christmas.

Class questions:

Q: In the book the zombies are called unmentionables. Why did you choose to avoid that word—zombie—and choose to call them unmentionables?

SG-S: In Jane Austen’s time nobody said what they really meant. It was all these flourishes of language and calculated polite conversations. Nobody really got down to the nitty gritty of what they were talking about and everything was euphemized. Throughout the book they euphemize zombies, except for Elizabeth—she calls them zombies because she doesn’t care. They call them the manty dreadfuls, the sorry stricken, Lucifer’s Brigade, mainly it was just an excuse for me to make up silly names for them.

When asked about which scenes stood out to him as being zombie-friendly while planning the novel:

SG-S: The character of Elizabeth Bennett, she’s like the first literary badass. Jane Austen was one of the first literary feminists and definitely the most recognized. So it made sense, all I had to do was drop a dagger into her hand and make up a back story that she was trained in Shao-Lin.

One of the things that jumped out to me was the regiment that was camped out near Meryton. In the original book, there are these soldiers there…for no reason at all! From a plot standpoint, they’re there for Lydia and Mary and all these girls to flirt with and for Wickham to be introduced and for evil Wickham to do his evil. But why aren’t they off fighting Napoleon somewhere? So that was one of the first things where I was like, okay, they’re there digging up graves and burning bodies. The other thing, as you go along, it’s weird how many opportunities you have to do it. In the original book they go to town and there’s this description of town, how impressive this huge town is. What I did was put a wall around it and made it a fortress. Then you have Lady Catherine, she’s this grand dame, she’s so old she shouldn’t even be alive. She’s rich and nobody likes her, it just made sense to me that as much as she is in the original book the antithesis of Elizabeth,… of course that means they have to have a final battle. It was weird how easily it all came together. It was a mixture of coffee and fear and sweat, it was weird how it all worked out.

Q: Obviously you’ve had a very positive response to the novel, but I was wondering if you’ve had any problem with Janeites?

SG-S: I have, yeah. I was on a radio show with the BBC this morning and it was an ambush interview.
“To counterpoint you today we’re going to have a professor of Jane Austen from Oxford.”
I did this book not from a standpoint wanting to ruin Jane Austen, but I did this book from a standpoint of wanting to pay tribute to her.

If you get your book published, do not read Amazon, because it is like chock full of hatred. Doesn’t matter how many books you’ve written. For one guy that says “I love this book, it’s great,” there are 3,000 that say, “This author should be dragged through the street and shot.”  (Before anyone even read the book he was called “stupid,” a “hack,” and ”the worst thing to ever happen to literature”. There has been, though, mostly positive reaction.)

The publisher had this fear that they were gonna cancel audiences out. No self respecting zombie person is gonna want to sit through 302 pages of a regency romance. No Janeite is gonna want to sit there and read about Elizabeth beheading zombies. But actually what happened is, it seems to be this chocolate peanut butter effect. Where it’s like, I can revisit my favorite book Pride and Prejudice and do it in this really light-hearted silly way. Or there’s the people that say, I would never be caught dead reading a Jane Austen novel, but how can I pass up an opportunity to read about zombies? The people that love Pride and Prejudice by and large have taken it with a great sense of humor and embraced it. But there are some people out there who would like burn me in effigy.

When asked about the study guide in the back of the book:

SG-S: The way the book was written, there was gonna be 2 blank pages at the back. So I made a Study Guide, my way of poking fun at myself with these discussion questions.

Q: Did you find yourself surprised by how easily the romance plot and the zombie plot go together?

SG-S: Frequently, the intent here was to weave between the lines and add new paragraphs here, a new line there. I was surprised by how easy it was, but in retrospect it’s because I was really adhering to the story that was already there. The characters still kind of end up in the same place, though not Wickham and Charlotte. Or poor, dreadful Mr. Collins, for that matter. All I really did was give them a larger scope for their actions. Darcy is still arrogant Darcy and Lizzy is still judgmental Lizzy, but they express themselves at the end of a sword or musket.

Jane Austen wrote about zombies, because if you think about it, her characters are these people who live in this bubble of immense wealth and immense privilege. You get the idea about these people that even if their country was burning to the ground around them they would still  concern themselves with “How much lamb do we have for supper?” or “Did you see so and so wore the most dreadful dress?” They’re not connected with reality, and what’s the definition of a zombie? A zombie is a person that’s cursed to walk the earth with a singular purpose. So thematically zombies make sense.

Q: Have you ever encountered a real zombie before?

SG-S: I met Joan Rivers once.

Q: What was your inspiration for the unmentionables?

SG-S: I’ve been a life-long horror fan. The movies I love are the Romero zombie movies: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and those are the zombies that I based these zombies off of. I like my zombies slow and stupid. There’s more opportunity for comedy. They’re just funnier, they’re more stupid and sympathetic. Zombies are the most sympathetic of all horror characters because they didn’t really have a choice. Zombies were just lying there perfectly happy in their coffins or pushing a shopping cart and somebody came along and bit them and they’re a zombie, but they had no choice.

When asked if he would be interested in doing more books in this genre (mash ups):

SG-S: My next book is called Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. It was really tempting to write War and Peace and More War, or like Wuthering Heights Reloaded, but I had a fear of being the mash up guy for the rest of my life. I never like to do anything similar. I’d like to keep writing fiction.

When asked about the artwork:

SG-S: You can buy posters of the cover for $5 at irreference.com. The success up to this point is because of the cover and the title. When all that Internet buzz was going on and I was getting phone calls from reporters and Entertainment Weekly was writing about this book, nobody had read the book. It wasn’t about the book, they didn’t care, it was about this idea. They were responding to this idea the same way I responded that day when my editor called me and said, “What do you think of this title?”

When asked if he wanted a role in the movie version of PPZ.

SG-S: I would love to be a zombie. If I can have the privilege of being beheaded in that movie that would be great.

Q: What did you think of Jane Austen’s humor working with your humor?

SG-S: When I read the book when I was 14, it was like getting a kid to take his medicine. I didn’t get it, I didn’t give it a chance.  When I revisited it, the first thing that struck me was how funny Jane Austen was, she’s very funny. People don’t give her enough credit, they think she’s this sort of uptight spinstery, never-been-kissed type of author. Which she may have been, but she’s also extremely funny and extremely arch. She’s sarcastic and even a little mean spirited in the way that she critiques this society in which she lived. Which for me is what makes it great. The fact that she saw her contemporaries for what they were.

Q: Why do you think today’s audiences are so receptive of this kind of a mash up?

SG-S: Because her themes are so universal. It’s the same reason why Jane Austen has been translated into every language you can imagine.  It’s because she writes about universal themes and it’s because she draws these characters so well that people feel they know them and can relate to them. That’s why she’s enduring, that’s why 200 years later she’s still as popular as she ever was, probably more so.

Q: Do you prefer the Keira Knightley version or the BBC version?

SG-S: I prefer the BBC version.

Q: In terms of the sword fighting and ninja stuff, did you have to do any type of extensive research on that?

SG-S: Because I watch so many movies, more than I should, I have this whole vast Hong Kong cinema/Wachowski Brothers/Grindhouse in my head. It’s all up there wasting away.  I just write cinematically. The same thing with the zombies. What would George Romero do?

Q: When asked about deadlines:

SG-S: I’m not one of those guys that can type on my laptop in a coffee shop. I feel like a douche bag. That doesn’t apply to students in coffee shops. I wrote most of this book on our dining room table on a laptop, heavily caffeinated as I am when I’m writing. I’m one of those guys that’s usually like a 9 to 5er. I get up, I write for three hours, I have lunch. I write for two hours, I kind of run out of steam at that point. I kind of hang out with my wife, with my kid and then when they get ready to go back to bed I jug down some more caffeine and write from like seven to midnight or beyond. I do that basically every single day when I’m on an assignment. I have to be religious about it whether I’m on a deadline or not.  I can’t just write when the inspiration comes, can’t do it because it’s almost never there.

Q: What’s the best advice you can give someone who wants to become a writer?

SG-S: Read! That’s the first advice. Number one—read. Number two—understand that you’re gonna hate everything you write and if you don’t you’re probably not very good. My theory is if you get to the point where you’re like, “This is awesome,” then you don’t have anywhere to grow, you’re out of growth as a writer. Be prepared to judge yourself and let it be and move on. It’s all trial and error and it’s all mimicry. Find what works for you. Find the process that works for you, the hours that work for you and the tone that works for you. It’s all about getting through it and then going back and revising. Also persistence is key. I’m 33, I moved to LA 12 years ago and have been slugging away as best I could. So it took me 12 years and that’s not very long. 12 years is like an overnight success in writing. You just have to love it.
“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” –Winston Churchill.

When asked what Jane Austen would think of PPZ:
SG-S: I don’t know; I hope that she would have a sense of humor about it. I think she would be tickled by the fact that we were sitting here talking about her 200 years later. I hope she would. Parody is an imitation of the sincerest forms of flattery. I would hope she would be flattered by all the attention she’s getting.

Q: Have you considered going back to your high school English teacher to show off?

SG-S: Thanks to the power of Facebook, that has already happened.

Visit the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Facebook page.

Buy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Tags: Jane Austen, janeites, literary, literature, pride and prejudice, seth grahame-smith, unmentionables, zombies