Hot Nights

Sweltering, the air bakes itself into a meringue around you, somehow dry but sticky given the slightest chance. It seems churlish, temperamental, maleficent. It is a Hot Night, one of those in which every few minutes brings a flash of heat that makes you wonder if menopausality is to be your fate.

And then the corner of your eye is tugged towards Seth Grahame-Smith's sublime effort. If 'prosaic' is to prose as 'poetic' is to poetry, then this man has ennobled the former and raised it to the realms of the latter.

Why all of that?

For the spawn of Grahame and of Smith hath wrought a mighty deed. He hath co-opted that doyenne of ancient chick-lit, Jane Austen, and created from her carrion a true classic in a Mary Shelley Frankenstein sense. He hath taken up his pen to write Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I do not speak in jest. It is classic. It is wondrous, and Bingley will never seem the same again to you.

Read it! The first paragraph alone is worth the price of admission.

IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

Glorious, glorious prose. Even in the hot and heavy dead of night, it glows.