Some
years ago now, a small company rose up out of America’s east coast with the
striking title Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies. This was a fairly low-key release over here and information about
the book passed largely by word of mouth. Soon there were other books in the
range – Sense and Sensibility and Sea-monsters,
Mr. D’Arcy: Vampire, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer. When I
first saw the zombie book, I smirked: I figured, since it looked an awful lot
like one of those black, Penguin Classics releases, that it would be cute to
place it on my bookshelf along with my standard Austens – other browsers would
experience the double-take of seeing the anomaly, giggle over the cover and
move on. How disappointed was I to discover that there was an actual novel contained within those joke
wrappers?
It’s
probably just me, but I would have expected that the book would turn out to be
just a notebook of some kind – blank and ready for the owner’s musings to be
housed within. Or maybe that there would be an acknowledgement by the people at
Quirk Books that the book didn’t really exist, but here’s the actual Pride and Prejudice to read, in covers
that would make the average male Austen fan not too uncomfortable to break it out
on the train during the morning commute. Instead, it contains a boring, woefully
ghastly piece of drivel that takes the dead donkey of the one-note joke and flogs
it to Kingdom Come.
And
then came the sequels: flog, flog, flog...
In
genre fiction there is a place for pastiche; it works on the level of homage,
to demonstrate the writer’s knowledge and attunement to the original work or
author. These books aren’t even pastiche; they’re just bad. However, the
publishers have tapped into a phenomenon that is having long-reaching and
questionable impact on the world of literature.
Literary
immortality used to be a lofty and idealistic concept. The works of an author –
their canon – lived on after their death and became the scripted and peopled worlds
which they bequeathed to humanity. Nowadays, due to the fast-food consumption
of television programming and movie franchising, publishers are seeking to
emulate the filmed media models and cash in on the money flow. ‘Jane Austen’ is
now viewed as a franchise, available to be re-booted every other year or so, or
re-imagined for newer audiences or target markets. All it takes is for someone
to be roped in to writing the new material: in Austen’s case it’s P.D. James
with her Regency whodunit Death Comes to
Pemberley, or the whole slew of Young Adult re-imaginings of Austen’s books
(with the same titles, no less) to ‘update’ Austen for the younger,
iPhone-toting set. Ian Fleming’s ‘new’ Bond novels are being churned out by Sebastian
Faulkes and others; Eric van Lustbader is pumping out ‘new’ Jason Bourne books
for the Robert Ludlum Estate.
Literary
immortality is no longer a theoretical concept; it’s a thriving business.
However, more is not ‘more’; in terms of quality, ‘more’ is something far, far less.
It’s
not that this concept is particularly new. “Clueless”
was an extremely clever film adaptation of Austen’s Emma; Akira Kurosawa gave
us “Throne of Blood” as an homage to “Macbeth”, and then he and Sergio Leone
riffed off each other for the great samurai flick/spaghetti western to-ing and
fro-ing of “Yojimbo”/”A Fistful of Dollars”
and “Sanjuro”/”For a few Dollars More”.
Great English literature and the undead have met before when Val Lewton turned Jane Eyre into “I Walked with a Zombie” and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” was transformed into “Forbidden Planet”. However, these reincarnations all contained a
sense of affection for the source material. Nowadays it’s less about savouring
the work of an author; it’s about growing obese on the bloated, low-grade pap
that ghost-writers are spewing out in order to shift units.
We
live in an age where most of us have access to a computer and can write down
our thoughts and imaginings as we see fit. Self- and online-publishing are only
a few clicks and a cash transaction away; publishing houses are divorcing themselves
of the need to proof-read and edit material and they get their cues from the “likes”
and “+1s” that social media flag in order to kill some trees and bankroll an
actual physical book. Part of the process is the creation of new iterations of
classic reads – these are safe options since they have been tested over time –
and the works of standard, prize-winning, ‘safe’ authors, like Salman Rushdie
and Umberto Eco.
Quality
has given way to quantity: people want to be immersed in a weighty tome, to be
taken out of their humdrum lives by means of some brick of a book whose best
feature is that it can hold open a door. And when that’s finished they want
another one - as the fantasy genre of publishing has proven over time. Escapism
is something that people have always craved and bad times are a spur to it –
Hollywood has never suffered due to an economic downturn. All forms of media
and entertainment are now being conflated, governed by the same marketing
approaches and, sad to say, the priceless gems of literature – and our ability
to appreciate them – are being eroded by the process.
We
live in a world where Fifty Shades of
Grey is a benchmark by which to measure good writing. God help us all!
*****
Which
brings me back to Quirk Books of Philadelphia and around to Lovecraft. In my
constant quest for Lovecraftiana, I have recently acquired the first two books
in a series of YA fiction penned by one “Charles Gilman” (aka. Jason Rekulak),
entitled Tales from Lovecraft Middle
School. These books follow the high school misadventures of Robert Arthur
and his friends as he settles in to the new local educational institution. From
there on in, it’s strictly “Buffy the
Vampire Slayer” territory. In the first instalment, the titular Professor
Gargoyle turns out to be a demon working at the behest of a secretive Master,
while in the second book the socially-adept Slither Sisters are medusae,
seeking election on the student council in order to sacrifice the entire
Seventh Grade to the ominous Master. And that’s it. The rest is geeks,
slackers, cool kids, quarterbacks, cheerleaders and oblivious teachers. You do
the maths.
The
production quality of the books is excellent, but having had their previous
efforts optioned as movies and even turned into a B-grade flick have ensured
that quality of presentation is not an issue for Quirk. Both novels have high-quality
lenticular covers – otherwise known as “winkies” – that shift as the book
moves, turning high school girls into snake-haired monsters and scary-looking
schoolmasters into even scarier demons. (The fact that I was wondering what
would happen if I tried to scan these covers had very little to do with my
presenting them here. Very little. Almost nothing. Almost.)
There’s
nothing very Lovecraftian about these books: they throw about a lot of canon names
– Tillinghast, Dunwich, Gilman – but the monsters are mainly of the Western
mythic tradition, with harpies, medusa, demons and giant snakes. Not a Mi Go in
sight. It’s as if the folks at Quirk are worried about some perceived litigious
ramifications and are unaware of the ‘open source’ nature of the Mythos. The
occasional tentacle intrudes; there’s a two-headed rat and a ghost, but not a
lot of Lovecraft besides the name. And Mr Rekulak’s unspeakable writing hasn’t
improved upon Seth Grahame-Smith's work on Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies, but at least it’s aimed at a more appropriate audience.
For
completists only.
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