Mash-Ups

You know, the popular books that mix classic literature with a horror element (like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies et ad finitum). I'm not going to bash them, they are a clever concept and I'm sure they are worth some entertainment value, but they're not to my taste.

There was an article on the genre in USA Today and one commentator suggested that the people who criticize this genre should "lighten up" and that the authors "probably wouldn't have minded the books, and quite possibly might have a chuckle at them."

Maybe. Then again, knowing a bit about some of these authors, maybe not.

Charlotte Bronte, though some of her stories have a faint Gothic tint to them, had an obsessive mind at times, she knew it and she was careful about what she heard and read about the supernatural. She stopped her good friend and biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell (a Gothic novel writer herself) from retelling a ghost story,

"... (she) confessed that she was superstitious and prone at all times to the involuntary recurrence of any thoughts of ominous gloom which might have been suggested to her." - The Life of Charlotte Bronte by E. Gaskell

Would Bronte be "tickled" to see her Jane Eyre mashed with vampires? (Jane Sleyre- vampire mash-up). Ehhhh ....

I don't know as much about Ms.Jane Austen's life, or her mental constitution, but I have studied her Northanger Abbey in college and recall that it was esentially a negative commentary on Gothic romances of the time.

Leo Tolstoy have a good-natured chuckle over his Anna Karenina made into a robot horror? (Android Karenina) Knowing a little about Leo Tolstoy, not to mention the Russian sentiment about their literary heroes, I really doubt he or most of his countrymen would approve.

I'm starting to think that these classic authors might not appreciate mash-ups if they knew of them, but I could be wrong-the authors aren't available for comment.

These authors didn't write for pure entertainment value, they wrote to say something; to uncover a perspective, to dig up a little nugget of life that was worth holding up to the light. (Yes, yes, they did write for money too.) They wrote to make people think, to make people feel genuine emotion, not disgust and comic horror.

Everyone has their specific taste in books and who's to say what genres are "good" and which ones are "bad," but I wouldn't go so far as to assume the authors (quite helpless to defend themselves, really) would bless their zombified masterpieces.

Good grief, try to comment and change a few words of a fellow writer's work, and see how they feel about it. They usually don't like it.