Grahame-Smith, Seth. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 25 pages. 10.4.09.

I have been resisting the occasional urge to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies since it first hit shelves, but decided to pick it up recently because I thought it might be a fun work to include in a class on satire. However, within just a few pages I realized that Grahame-Smith's atrocity is never something I would want to introduce in the classroom - not because of the content, which is about what you can expect from the title - but because the writing is so atrocious. While I expected a quirky tongue-and-cheek rewriting of Jane Austen's novel what I found was a dull, repetitive, and obnoxious farce. The writing is so poor that it is impossible to even see the humor that the author supposedly intended; the original material is awkward and tedious, and Grahame-Smith is in desperate need of a decent thesaurus.

I had every intention of seeing the thing through to the end, whether or not I decided to include the work on my syllabus, but I just can't force myself to do it.