Terror is a dish best served cold. Hard to swallow, but very sweet. Terror is the enchantment that has kept the Gothic alive for centuries. From the Castle of Otranto, to Dracula and Poe, to Stephen King, fear has been selling books for 250 years. The twenty-first century gothic novel is still in love with the idea of overpowering fears, unstoppable zombies and seductive vampires. It is a form of escapism that is too appealing ever to decay.

Fear is no longer pure, unadulterated, bitter-sweet; now it has manners. Recent years have seen a new incarnation of the gothic, which is set to spawn a slew of imitators.  Ever heard of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Snapped up by American publishers Quirk, it’s the darker, grittier side of Elizabeth Bennet’s life. The bit that Austen didn’t want us to see. This Elizabeth is re-imagined as a zombie-ass-kicking diva, carefully navigating hordes of the undead in between tea parties, balls and marriage proposals. The new Regency Gothic genre is the invention of Los Angeles author, Seth Grahame-Smith who wanted to write a book exposing how “the people in Austen’s books are kind of like zombies.” Quirk swiftly followed with Ben Winters’ Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, in which the home of the young Miss Dashwood’s is surrounded by deadly sea creatures and the persistent Colonel Brandon is turned into a tentacled fiend.  Sourcebooks also staked their claim in the market with Amanda Grange’s Mr Darcy, Vampyre.

Grahame-Smith likens the characters of Austen’s novels to the undead because, “No matter what is going on around them in the world, they live in this bubble.”

 But surely he realises, you shriek, throwing your hands up, that Austen, the greatest of wits, has done this for him already? The critique of polite, insular society was her forte. The gothic of Seth Grahame-Smith and Ben Winters, only offers a cruder lens through which to view Austen’s satire.

It is easy to scoff at modern gothic for its wide appeal and cheap thrills.  Easy to class the new gothic as a set of tired, lazy mash-ups which constitute nothing less than the blue-blooded murder of classic literature and qualify as mere chick-lit trash.               

Pardon my impudence, madam, but I beg you, give me a moment to explain. In our post-modern, capitalist world we fear the attack of faceless evil: disease, terrorism, global warming, nuclear war. New hopefuls such as Grahame-Smith revert to a simpler time and impose on Regency mores “the large groups of faceless people in the world who mean to do us harm.”

Look again at Twilight. It is condemned and derided because it dramatises a fear of teenage sexual freedom, which we associate with preachy, Bible-Belt America. Written by a Mormon housewife, it trumpets the goodness of abstinence and the perils of temptation. In repressive Victorian society, the vampire bite was a crafty metaphor for forbidden sex. The omnipresence of sex in today’s Twilight world means that idea of sex being out of reach is in itself titillating. 

The Gothic always had the potential to be trash. Its high octane drama, shrill characters and sexual themes made it a sensationalist genre, which sold best in the form of “Penny Dreadfuls”, cheap widespread magazines: the Victorian equivalent of Heat. Fear now strikes on a global scale, bigger and more powerful than ever. The gothic mash-up creates a world which is simpler and less threatening than our own, where fear can be fought face on.

From ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters’

‘At Bath, he had met young Eliza, had saved her from the attack of a giant octopus... And then he had left the girl whose youth and innocence he had seduced in a state of upmost distress, with no credible home, no help, no friends, ignorant of his address. He had buried her in the sand in a playful fashion as lovers do when sporting; and then, without digging her up, he had gone off, he said, to buy them lemonades; he never returned.’

“Thwack! A harpoon pierced the giant octopus’s bulbous head, and it burst, raining blood and ooze into the brook and all over Marianne, who managed to lift her face from the water as the tentacle released its grip. As she lay gasping on the bank, soaked by the fetid water and the foul juices of the monster, spitting small bits of brain and gore from the corners of her mouth, a gentleman clad in a diving costume and helmet, and carrying a harpoon gun, ran to her assistance.....’

From ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

“From the corner of the room, Mr Darcy watched Elizabeth and her sisters work their way outward, beheading zombie after zombie as they went. He knew of only one other woman in Great Britain who wielded a dagger with such skill, such grace, and deadly accuracy.

By the time the girls reached the walls of the assembly hall, the last of the unmentionables lay still. Apart from the attack, the evening altogether passed off pleasantly for the whole family. Mrs Bennet had seen her eldest daughter much admired by the Netherfield party.”

Excerpts ©2009 Quirk Productions, Inc. Used with permission of Quirk Books.