Elizabeth Bennet has never been so appealing as when she is bashing out the brains of Satan's zombie army. Seth Grahame-Smith's novel, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," out April 8, is nearly 85 percent of Jane Austen's original romantic comedy but with the added infusion of viciously graphic battles with the walking dead on every page.
Unless you have a squeamish stomach unable to withstand reading a vivid account of a classic heroine ripping out the guts of a bloodthirsty zombie, the content within the book stays closer to the original text's comedic tone, rather than giving any actual reason to terrify readers. But as a connoisseur of horror-themed literature, the upcoming release of this major horror-themed novel seems a good a time as any to divulge two books and a play that continue to disturb and haunt me more than any celluloid manifestation of repugnance ever has.
The books that are prescribed to the masses of high school literature students to suffer through are mostly wordy classics that are abandoned after a chapter or two in favor of the more succinct Spark Notes. Imagine the surprise that came when I opened the final reading assignment of my senior year and found that the first sentences didn't so much loll passively into the recesses of my mind as grabbed me by the throat.
"I still get nightmares," began Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves." "In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. But one ever really gets used to the nightmares."
And as my fellow classmates and I ventured further and further into the passages of the novel, it became clear from our collective dreary eyes and slouched postures that none of us was sleeping too well.
Critics have described "House of Leaves" as everything from a love story to a satire about academic criticism. To anyone who has been sucked into its pages though, it is clear that the book defies genre classification. It is a narrative with three narrators, all of whom are descending slowly into insanity. The primary character, tattoo parlor employee Johnny Truant, discovers a muddled analysis of a presumably fictional documentary called "The Navidson Record" in a deceased man's apartment he plans to move into.
The documentary chronicles the experiences of a family who find that their new house is larger on the inside than the outside and that a closet in their living room contains not coats, but an infinite and ever-expanding abyss. Stephen King, America's most popular horror novelist, has frequently lamented in interviews that audiences will never be so frightened at the monster at the top of the stairs as they will be at the ascent that precedes it. "House of Leaves" eliminates the reveal of the physical beast and instead replaces it with nothingness.
In 1960, it was said that some audience members seeing Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" were so disturbed at the events on screen that they ran screaming out of the theatre. Unfortunately, I've never had the privilege of seeing this event transpire in a modern day film screening. I have, however, witnessed it at a Broadway play. Electroshock therapy and severed fingers are noticeably absent in typical high-end Broadway productions.
In Martin McDonagh's "The Pillowman" however, they are elements in a dystopian world of brutality and flawed justice. Katurian Katurian, the play's lead character, is tortured by two corrupt detectives to unravel the striking similarities between the deaths of characters in his unpublished short stories, and the real-life murders of local children. Intermission came, and audience members fled the theater like rats from a fire. The quality of the production itself was unquestionably brilliant, with star Billy Crudup even receiving a Tony nomination for his role.
Throughout the play, Katurian doesn't shy away from retelling his gruesome tales of child torture to the audience and ultimately gives his life so his artistic work can live on even after he has been executed by a totalitarian regime for his presumed part in the murders. I've translated some of the play's monologues into campfire stories, and on several occasions had some walk-outs - or rather, walk-aways - myself as I went about telling "The Little Jesus," a story of a misguided little girl who believed she was the son of God and subsequently dies in much the same manner as her biblical doppelganger. Between the monstrous void in "House of Leaves," and the onstage brutality in "The Pillowman," McDonagh and Danielewski prove that horror doesn't always have to be accompanied with a side of popcorn. And while I somehow doubt "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" will bring true terror to bedsides, it will be a welcome change to envision its grotesque images with no limitations of budget or scope in the limitless expanse of my own imagination.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
