"Pride Prejudice Zombies"

What if you took a Jane Austen novel and turned it into a zombie story? That appears to be the moment of creative insight that occurred to Seth Grahame-Smith who penned the novel "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies":

It is a truth commercially acknowledged that Jane Austen’s high-spirited heroines can be recast as Hollywood brats or Bollywood sirens, wittily navigating the eternal perils of class, romance and unworthy men.

Few challenges, however, are as unusual as the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice – a plague of the undead sent to reduce the picturesque villages of Longbourn and Meryton to smouldering ruins.

Don't believe me? Here's the book's Amazon listing. Author Grahame-Smith's additional thoughts on the matter:

This weekend Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of P&P&Z who is based in Los Angeles, revealed how he and an editor at Quirk Books, an independent publisher, developed a diagram tracing connections between seminal period novels to cult movie genres, including robots, vampires and aliens.

“It quickly became obvious that Jane [Austen] had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel,” said Grahame-Smith, a television comedy writer. “Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously.”

Is "monster lit" a trend? A Tracking Board.com post today asserts that the project is out wide to buyers, repped by CAA, and with Natalie Portman attached. Talk about high concept? Here's the book's logline:

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!"

As one of the TB posters says, "Jane Austen rolls over in her grave yet another time. Then gets up."

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Forgot about "The Harvard Zombie Massacre" which sold back in June 2008.