Can you believe it's been 5 years since the release of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies? And just over 200 from the release of the original novel? Well, to celebrate, the folks at Quirk Books (who published ...and Zombies and its followups, as well as many other fine collections of pulped trees) asked me to do some digging and explore the past, present, and future of their massive mashup mega-hit -- where it started, how it worked, and what it did for the company over the last 5 years. The short answer is that it basically launched their entire fiction line, which is now tremendously successful -- and also served as an accidental omen to our current pop-culture status of zombie overload (seriously! They beat the trend! But barely). For the long answer? Check out my 3-piece retrospective on Pride & Prejudice & Zombies on the Quirk website.
blog
Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).
Guest Blog: Chess Motifs
I've been doing some guestblogging for Quirk Books, publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and that soon-to-be hit Broetry (what you mean, you haven't bought a copy yet?!), and my first post is up today. It's a countdown of one of my favorite character types in pop culture/literature: the Chessmaster, that brilliant strategist who plays 50 moves ahead of the rest of the cast in the story, and always seems to have some grander scheme in mind that we as readers/viewers/audience can hardly even begin to comprehend. And they always know how to manipulate and play the other characters into going along with their plans, whether they realize it or not. We're talking Nick Fury, Ben Linus, Dumbledore, the Cigarette Smoking Man — you know the type. Check out the full list at the link below. Agree? Disagree? Let me know on the Quirk comments!
"Life Is A Game Of Chess: Top Ten Chessmasters in Pop Culture & Literature" at Quirk Books
Kitties and Nihilism. Yum.
Better late than never, I have a new review up on DailyGenoshan.com of The Meowmorphosis, the latest literary mash-up from Quirk Books, wherein Gregor Samsa awakens to find that he turned into a giant cockroach giant adorable kitty. From the publisher:
“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten.”
The phenomenal success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies inspired a massively popular literary-remix movement. Now Quirk Classics once again charts bold new territory, turning the monster-mash-up formula inside out to infuse Franz Kafka’s horrific masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, with the fuzziest, snuggliest, most adorable creatures possible: kittens!
Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support his parents and sister. His life goes strangely awry when he wakes up late for work and finds that, inexplicably, he is now a man-sized baby kitten. His family freaks out: Yes, their son is OMG so cute, but what good is cute when there are bills piling up? And how can he expect them to serve him meals every day? If Gregor is to survive this bizarre, bewhiskered ordeal, he’ll have to achieve what he never could before — escape from his parents’ house. Complete with haunting illustrations and a provocative biographical exposé of Kafka’s own secret feline life, The Meowmorphosis will take you on a journey deep into the tortured soul of the domestic tabby.