So there seems to be an...infection of horror in the literary classics genre. We'll call "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" patient 0 in this epidemic, from which it spread to the rest of Austen and, from there on in, rest of the canon.
Observe -
I think Wuthering Bites might actually be worth picking up. If any character is asking for the vampire treatment it's Heathcliff.
Now, I should note, I have not read any of these, they are here because the titles made me laugh or cry or do both at the same time.
I should, because my one experience with horror mashups was P&P&Z and I was...unimpressed. Not because of the zombies, I thought they were funny. But Seth Graham Smith is merely a passable author and to hold his prose up next to Austen's makes for an uncomfortable reading experience.
A good literary mashup is the same as a good musical mashup - the material has to fit together. Not contentwise, but stylistically. And this didn't.
And while you can make the argument that pitting two completely different musical styles that simply sound terrible together is a biting observation into the realm of our preconceived auditory tastes and our inability to get beyond our own expectations (blah, blah, blah, purple monkey dishwasher) and I can't disagree with a statement like that. Well, I suppose I could (who are we kidding, I AM) and it really comes down to an assessment of what the purpose of arts are.
(I seem to have gotten up on a soapbox at some point, I apologize for that, but feel free to keep reading, I'm not ready to step down. Actually, I'm just getting to the sweeping claims portion of today's events.)
There are three reasons to create art. And by art, I mean music, literature, paintings, sculptures, movies, video games, etc. For something to be good (watch me not define that term), it will usually fit into at least two of those reasons. Great things tend to be all three.
1) For the sake of the artist. The artist wants to do something and said artist is damn well going to get it out of their head and onto a page, out on an instrument, into an image, etc. Arguably, this is creative masturbation and most of us do it sooner or later (and if you don't, then you probably should be). Some of it is good. Some of it is so horrible that we've spent months tracking down every place it ever existed on the internet and deleting it. But that's neither here nor there. And sometimes you get something amazing that turns out to also include reason #2 even if the author was not doing it for any reason other than that the idea had to get out.
2) For the sake of the audience. This is what happens when the artist wants to make something that will be popular...the name Michael Bay comes to mind. A lot of video games seem to me to fall into this category, mostly those of the "Look at the high resolution of this blood spatter!" variety. Anyway, this is when the idea comes from outside of the artist and the artist attempts to create a work that fits in with this larger cultural idea.
This isn't always bad, but I would argue that it works better when coupled with #! - when the author has an idea that taps in and is expanded by the cultural millieu.
3) For the sake of the message. This is different than art for art's sake. This is when someone decides to create because they want to make a statement. A sort of "I think that stopping pollution is important, so I'm going to make statues of dying ducks out of soda cans and the ring things that hold them together." Which, again, has its place and can serve as inspiration, but without the artist's drive to create and work with the material and DO something, there's a falseness and a lifelessness to it as art.
Now, this obviously is not true of everything. I would for, example, class Twilight and Avatar as purely "author-wank" but they seem to be extremely popular. On the other hand, I would call "Lord of the Rings" the same thing (though there seems to be something oddly disrespectful about the terminology when applying it to JRR Tolkien) and, again, extremely popular. Most of fanfic is much of the same, but then you find communities based on requesting fics from authors which are based around reason #2.
So it's complicated and not every piece of art can be categorized easily. I think, though, that P&P&Z in particular is a question of reasons 2 and 3. I got no sense from reading the book that SGS cared at all about what he was writing. This wasn't a story he wanted to tell, it was a convenient vehicle for zombies. And that bothered me. Part of the reason I'm optimistic about some of these I noted here is that the authors actually seem to have chosen the classics because they care about the original stories as well as the horror portion.
Not that caring makes something art (again, Twilight), but I don't think you can have art without a certain passion for the piece you are trying to create.
A bit of talent helps - you don't need to be Shakespeare or Da Vinci, but the reason I like the authors and artists and sculptors and musicians that I do is because they combine passion with enough mastery of their art that allows the passion to come through. And, without that passion and craft, these books are nothing more than jokes. With it, though, these have potential to be brilliant.
Maybe I'll start with Jane Slayre...Bronte (any Bronte) seems to be a good choice for a gothic mashup.
Alternatively, I will sit down and write the following (online points of no discernible value if you get the references):
Northanger Abbey and Ninjas.
Middlemartians.
Our Mutual Fiend.
Oliver Twisted - A story of loss, hope and the first cyborg.
The Werewolf of Notre Dame (easiest adaptation ever - I could get away with changing almost nothing).
Les Miserables et la Zombies (the barricade is built to hold off an advancing army of the undead. Also, Javert is a vampire. Because.)
Beowerewulf (For those of you who were wondering how he REALLY defeated Grendel).
I'm open to suggestions :)
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