Within the book, England has been suffering a zombie plague the last 50 years. Many people feel a duty to battle the zombie hordes for Queen and country. The patriarch of the Bennet family has raised his five daughters to be zombie slaying maidens of death. While Mrs. Bennet just seeks to arrange proper marriages for them. While several of the daughters of the family are followed throughout the book, it does focus on the second daughter, Elizabeth, who is a free thinking and feels that she is married to the sword until she begins to encounter Mr. Darcy.
I never read the unaltered novel so I really can’t compare this book to the original. The Booklist review for this book says that 85 percent of the original material was persevered in this book. It is very easy to tell where the old text was altered and the new text was added but none of it comes across as awkward. While one review of the book has joked that it takes a classic and “makes it readable”, in my opinion it does so but just barely. The addition of zombies, ninjas, and martial arts action are brief respites from the rest of the text which is slow moving. While I may be an uncultured barbarian to some, it is still a very slow moving book.
In looking at this book from the viewpoint of a gamer, there are a number of ideas in this book that may be of interest to those who like a bit of tongue and cheek horror in a Victorian backdrop and more specifically for people that play Unhallowed Metropolis.
For UnMet fans, people may certainly see the Bennet sisters in the role of Mourners. It was easy for me to imagine the acolytes of the Mourners Guild being trained by Shaolin and Japanese masters. Another concept is that of “reclaimers” people that captures zombies and turns them in for a bounty. These sound like Undertakers. One interesting twist is the idea that some unscrupulous reclaimers capture people and purposely infect people to earn their way.
If you have never been into classics Sense and Sensibility and Jane Eyre then this may just get you through and make you feel like you’ve gotten some culture. Just don’t expect this to be full of non-stop action.
