Dawn of the Dreadfuls: A Prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Steve Hockensmith

<Movie Trailer Voice> Four years before the events of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the residents of Longbourn lived through the Dawn of the Dreadfuls¹. </Movie Trailer Voice>

It's really more of a Second Dawn, as we quickly learn that the dreadfuls had almost overrun England some thirty years back -- before either being defeated or just stopping.  (I never was quite sure about that.)  Anyway, when the dreadfuls return, Mr. Bennet -- who valiantly fought them as a young man -- regrets his failure to raise his daughters as warriors.

So he sets out to right that wrong -- and reclaims his dojo, which Mrs. Bennet had been using as a potting shed.  It isn't long before Geoffrey Hawksworth, a very rude, very handsome man sent by The Order (again, not really explained, so I just thought of them as a generic non-government undead-fighting martial arts-loving group), arrives to take over their training.  Also new to the community is a friendly young scientist, Dr. Bertram Keckilpenny, who has come to study the dreadfuls -- and both men seem quite taken with Elizabeth Bennet, who hasn't even had her coming out ball yet.

Meanwhile, the inhabitant of Netherfield Hall, Lord Lumply -- whose physical attributes mirror his name -- has taken an interest in sweet, calm, obedient Jane.

Oh, the Bennet sisters.  Even with zombies shuffling amok, they can't escape The Romance.

As I couldn't even finish Pride and Prejudice and Zombies², I was surprised at how much I ended up enjoying Dawn of the Dreadfuls.  It was all written by one author, so it didn't suffer from the flow issues that P&P&Z did, and it was written as an original story, so the plot kept my interest (because even though I knew where Austen's characters would be at by the end of the book, I didn't know about the others -- or how it would all play out).  Steve Hockensmith did a great job of writing a hammed-up, occasionally bawdy (to the point that I was occasionally reminded of Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape) version of Jane Austen's style, while keeping her characters true (well, broad-strokes-true) to the originals:

"Papa saw a zombie eat a Scotsman once!" Lydia threw in, oblivious, as always, to subtext and nuance in conversation or anything else.  "Mary told me he said . . . what?"

She glared over at Kitty, who, ever her mother's daughter, was delivering a vicious pinch under the table.

"I'm sure His Lordship doesn't want to hear about that," Kitty said.  "Particularly from you."

The she turned back to the baron, hacked out what she took to be a decorous little cough, and didn't so much steer the conversation back to safer territory as pick it up and hurl it there.

"My, but the sun was strong today.  Can you believe it's only April?"

So, yes -- a VERY pleasant surprise.  I liked it so much that I'll definitely pick up Hockensmith's Sherlock Holmes westerns.

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¹You see what I did there?  Heh.

²Loved the idea, hated the book.  It read like an abridged version of Pride and Prejudice with some pages of stapled-in Bonus Zombie Action.  The zombie stuff didn't blend in at all, so it was just a choppy, gimmicky mess.  (A choppy gimmicky zillions-of-dollars-earning mess, but that's the way it is with gimmicks.)

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Book source:  Review copy from the publisher.

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