Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters

So I just finished reading Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters. It definitely wasn't as good as Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. It was sort of a poor man's version. With PPZ, it was really the authors pet project and he was so thorough and though there were additions to the story, obviously, it really was just like an alternate reality to the original. The way he wrote the characters, you could really imagine that is how the Jane Austen characters would have acted had their world been invaded by a plague of the undead. With SSSM though, the book company just hired an author to write it, hoping to bank on the PPZ phenomenon, so it wasn't really this guys project, it was just a paycheck.

It was still an amusing read, but almost too over-the-top. With PPZ it was supposed to be funny, but at the same time he took the story very seriously. With this one it felt a little forced, and there were just some oddities and changes that didn't ring true. I know that may seem an ironic thing to say about novels that put monsters into distinguished literary classics, but somehow PPZ pulls off a certain grace that SSSM does not. So, I didn't hate it, but it was just okay. I would still definitely recommend PPZ though.

Now what will be next, you may ask? Perhaps, Emma Meets the Wolfman, or possibly, Mansfield Park: Space Invasion? Well, looks like what is next is a prequel to PPZ called Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Its another new writer, and this time, as a prequel story, it is only based on Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice characters and isn't actually taking any lines from a real story of hers. We'll see how it goes, but it may have been best to just stick with the originality of the first. Zombies are just funnier than Sea Monsters though, so I will probably still give it a shot.