Zombies

Rob recently played this, perhaps our favorite Jonathan Coulton song, and I realized that there are a lot of zombies in my entertainment right now.  What is up with that? It must be the zeitgeist.  The zombie zeitgeist.

We like to play games and Rob got several new ones for his birthday in December.  We also had a new baby in December so we didn't break them out and actually play any of them until our trip to California last week but they all turned out to be really fun.  One of them was "Give Me the Brain", a card game where all the players are zombies working at a fast-food restaurant.  You have to complete jobs, some of which you need a brain for and some of which you do not.  We've played this with both sets of our parents now and it is great fun, and I highly recommend it to any other game enthusiasts out there.

And then right now I am reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  How does all this Jane Austen fanfic keep getting published by actual publishers as actual books?  Why isn't it confined to the internet like most other fanfic?  A lot of it isn't even Bridget-Jones-style modern retellings, just straight-up fanfic. It must say something about the cultural importance and commercial appeal of Jane Austen that people publish, buy, and read books telling the original story from Darcy's perspective, scandalously explicit post-wedding sequels, and now the original story infested with zombies.  I'm about a third of the way through it right now and so far am enjoying it quite a bit.  It is a gimmick and a one-joke book, of course, but oh, what a good joke it is...  Seriously, it is literally the original novel (abridged a bit) with scenes of zombies attacking and being fought off inserted in.  I'd estimate that about 75% of the phrases are lifted straight from Austen, with the balance of the book involving zombies attacking during the balls, Elizabeth vanquishing zombies, Mrs. Bennet bemoaning the plague of the undead, etc.  It's a fantastic concept and is funny, funny, funny.