Dreadfully Ever After
The third instalment of the Quirk Classics’ Pride and Prejudice series, Dreadfully Ever After is set a number of years after events of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and follows our main protagonist Elizabeth in the wake of her marriage to Mr Darcy. Fans of the series will be pleased to know this lively sequel sees a return of all the old favourites, including nearly all of the Bennet sisters, as well as a number of familiar faces who make a surprise return towards the end.
The novel opens with a quite natural scene of Elizabeth and her husband Fitzwilliam Darcy strolling through the countryside. Because she is not a married woman, Elizabeth is no longer a warrior and is struggling to come to terms with her new role as wife. As she strolls with her husband however they are soon set upon by a recently zombified young Master Brayle and Mr Darcy receives an unwelcome bite which as readers of previous books will be aware, will soon turn Darcy into one of the “unmentionables”. Naturally Elizabeth should slay her husband at this point and save him from the ignominy of a cruel demise into zombie-hood, but something stays her hand and she decides instead to cover-up her husband’s accident and seek a cure to his infection.
Finding a cure is not easy however, and Elizabeth must confront her arch nemesis, Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh if she is to save her husband — and even more importantly in 19th century England — save her marriage.
Dreadfully Ever After is the second novel by Steve Hockensmith in the Pride and Prejudice series, and just like his other work, Dawn of the Dreadfuls, this latest novel is great fun to read. While in my mind at least the plot does seem a little weak in sections, with the multiple narrator strategy seeming a major departure from Austen’s original style, I don’t think the book loses anything in terms of its overall “feel”. Indeed what perhaps it loses in terms of its narrative it gains in both humour and characterisation as Hockensmith expands on characters such as Mary and Kitty with surprising and at times hilarious consequences. Kitty at last actually becomes a substantial character, as opposed to being the bit-part player she is in Austen’s original work.
For me, I quite like this. It certainly takes a fair amount of bravery to step out of the Austen shadow, but then at the end of the day, that’s exactly what these books are supposed to do. These Quirk Classics adaptations shouldn’t just be clones of famous literature. They are after all supposed to add something to their parent work — provide something different and amusing that gives readers a reason to want to pick them up and give them a read.
Dreadfully Ever After does this perfectly for me. While in previous reviews I have complained about other Quirk Classics titles for being either too dull, or too messed up, Dreadfully Ever After strikes a nice balance between being an independent work of humorous fiction in its own right, and being an adaptation of an Austen classic. While I still don’t think this book’s predecessor is a good book in the slightest, Dreadfully Ever After is for me, a fitting conclusion to the trilogy, and another fine work from its author.
