Sense And Sensibility and Sea Monsters

This book is the second in the Quirk Classics line, the first being "Pride and Predjudice and Zombies." The point behind these books is to rework classic books that have fallen out of copywright to include subject matter the original author probably didn't intend. I can't judge the effect of PPZ (having not read it yet) but SSSM doesn't quite mesh. I think that this may be because "zombies" are a well-established horror trope: we kind of know what to expect from reading a zombie story, and applying it to a Jane Austen romance is intriguing because of it. Whereas "sea monsters" is much more broad and vague, leading to Ben H. Winters (the co-author with Austen) to have our characters just be attacked by giant hostile versions of a variety of sea life, which just seems silly and not scary. Also, Pride and Predjudice is probably Austen's most well-known novel, and more people would know the basic plot than Sense and Sensibility.

The plot consists of the three Dashwood sisters and their mother who are cheated of their inheritance and are forced to live in the remote Barton Cottage in Devonshire. the main alteration in this story is that the cottage is in fact on one of a desolate aeries of islands, full of ferocious giant octopi, a fearful two-headed sea serpent, and strange half-seen figures chanting in a terrifying language. There they attempt to find suitors in order to be married.

Some of the new stuff works. Colonel Brandon, who in the original novel was a slightly older and slightly more boring of two suitors for the middle sister Marianne, is given another reason why Marianne initially prefers his competitor the dashing treasure hunter Willoughby: Brandon had been cursed with a face covered in tentacles by a sea witch, and is therefore physically repulsive. a brief interlude with pirates is interesting, as is the way the characters deal with them, although it's much too brief. And near the end of the book there is an introduction of Lovecraftian-style horrors that was really cool, although the payoff is waaaaay too little and waaay too late in the story (practically the end of the book, actually).

However, there is too much whimsy in the book for it to really work. Willoughby the treasure hunter has an oragutan valet named Monsieur Pierre. Why? Presumably because Winters thought oragutans inherently funny. They aren't, especially since Monsieur Pierre does absolutely nothing in the book except be an oragutan and stand around in the background. There are also way too many scenes of some servant fending off some terrible sea beast in the background while the main characters talk about who they love and who they're wanting to marry in the foreground, completely unconcerned. I get what Winters was trying to do, lampoon the Regency-era aristocracy for their detachment from real life, but it just comes off as the main characters being assholes. Really, in some places the Austen plot gets in the way of the Winters story: in my least favorite scene two of the girls discuss their relationship to one of the men in the story WHILE FIGHTING OFF A GIANT SEA SERPENT. It just doesn't work.

However, one final thing that I quite liked was the Reader's Discussion Guide at the back, a parody of the sort of questions one finds in cheap copies of classic texts that supposedly aid in the understanding of the same. Some of the questions they ask are really quite funny in my opinion.

All in all, SSSM is an interesting try with some good sequences, but all in all it doesn't quite work. The jury's still out on PPZ, but I hope for the best.