Classics Gone Wild: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Beyond — A Guide to Literary Monster Mashups by Kate Nagy and Rachel Hyland is a non fiction book that I loved.
If you like literary monster mashups, then this is the book or ebook for you. This is a fairly short book that offers a fairly comprehensive review of the ones available.
It has a nearly complete list of all the Pride and Prejudice monster mashups – warning, there are a lot. For example, it includes the famous Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. However, it does miss out one of my favourites, Pride and Platypus: Mr. Darcy’s Dreadful Secret by Vera Nazarian. I presume that came out after this book was written.
It also includes sections on mashups of other Jane Austen works, other classic English literature, classic American literature, classic foreign literature and a miscellaneous section that includes It’s Beginning to look a Lot like Zombies, which mashes up Christmas carols with yes, you’ve guessed it, zombies. I’d already heard of some of the mashups such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters or Little Vampire Women or The Meowmorphosis but there were a fair few I’d never heard of such as A Vampire Christmas Carol or The Late Gatsby.
There’s a review for every novel mentioned as well as a nifty Monster Mashup Generator at the end, which suggests classic novels and monsters for a literary monster mashup for aspiring authors although the authors do point out that the craze for these is probably over now.
The reviews in Classics Gone Wild are interesting and amusing and can help you to choose which literary mashup you want to try.
The other thing I really like about the ebook version is that it has a working table of contents, so you can click on a title and go straight to the review. I hate ebooks that don’t have this feature when it’s so easy to include.
