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The plague of remakes and adaptations has spread from the TV/film industry into the world of fiction, and it’s all this guy’s fault.
Jason Rekulak, editor of Quirk Books. You can’t see this right now, but I’m looking at his website online and shaking my fist at it.
No, I don’t want to be a hater, especially considering I was drinking the kool-aid along with everyone else when the fad began.
It all started when the previously mentioned editor, Mr. Rekulak, was struck by a moment of pure genius. That idea was “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” written by Seth Grahame-Smith, and of course, Jane Austen. When I first heard of it, my reaction was likely akin to that initial moment of nerdy joy experienced by Rekulak. What a concept! How bizarre and hilarious! Furthermore, I really was quite impressed how Grahame-Smith managed to weave the zombie/ninja storyline in with such ease. In other words, the additional subplots made a kind of deranged sense along with the original source material. I even thought, “Hey, if this gets young people to be interested in classics, than who am I to criticize.”
Then came, “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,” by Ben Winters. Next think you know, Col. Brandon had a squid face, and Edward Ferrars is about to be eaten by Lucy, a sea witch. There were underwater domes and islands turning into giant sea beasts, and so much rubbish that I normally might find intriguing in a book of its own. The thing is, unlike his predecessor, Mr. Grahame-Smith, Winters’s mashup felt not so much like a joining of classic book and comedic writer, but like a semi running down a poor, defenseless family of Victorian squirrels. It all felt extremely tacked on, which made it boring and poorly written!
The more I got to think about it, the more irritated I became. All these guys did was take an established masterpiece, and then just add the word zombie or Kraken in every two pages and suddenly they’ve got a writing career?
Needless to say, my interest had waned. How I prayed this fad would go away! All the nights I spent kneeling before my shrine to Charles Dickens, burning incense and chanting passages from my 1910 edition of “Martin Chuzzlewit,” hoping that the great Victorian author might strike down this unholy epidemic of crappy literary adaptations.
No dice, Steinho. The phenomenon was here to stay. In the last few months, I’ve been subjected to such silliness as “Android Karenina,” and “Jane Slayre.” Louisa May Alcott has been doubly treated with both “Little Women and Werewolves,” and “Little Vampire Women.” I guess they’re trying to appeal to both sets of Twilight fans. Then, for the historically minded, have a crack at “Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter,” or “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.” Who doesn’t love reading about their favorite political figure stabbing something to death! Apparently a lot of people, considering the reviews.
Maybe some of these other books actually are funny or well done. I’ve only read the first two released by Quirk Books, and I would not dream of submitting them to the full Steinho wrath without having actually read them first. But like the movie industry with their endless string of terrible 1970s TV show remakes, or delightful children’s books adaptations that have left me weeping for my childhood, these literary concoctions make me feel that the true intent of such projects isn’t to tell a mesmerizing story, but just to make money. Trust me, as an aspiring writer myself, I have no delusions that the creative world is a business like everything else. Yet, shouldn’t we at least be trying to come up with something new? Isn’t that the point of having an imagination, to create new heroes, scarier villains, more exotic adventures? Story structures are old as time, but the details, can’t we at least come up with them on our own? Do we really need to dig poor Miss Austen back out of her grave just to slather her up with zombies, or mummies, or pterodactyls?
Or maybe I should just get back to working on my latest manuscript, “The Canterbury Tails: A Dinosaur’s Pilgrimage.”
Sadly, it’s probably already been done.
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One big, big obstacle the mash-ups face is that everyone who has not read them assumes they are alike and mindless. I wrote LITTLE WOMEN AND WEREWOLVES as a tribute to Alcott and her book, and tried to write it the way the author would have if she could have included werewolves in her book. I carefully maintained her plot, characterization and themes. For this reason, my publisher decided to market it under the conceit that it was the original LITTLE WOMEN that had to be edited to get past the Victorian male editors.
ReplyDeleteI chose to write this book, at my agents suggestion, because I wanted to show that the mash-ups did not have to be parodies reminiscent of National Lampoon. Alcott wanted to write lurid books about murder, adultery and drug addiction, and I know she would have been amused and flattered by this book. She,herself, wrote LITTLE WOMEN for the money because she couldn't live on what she earned from her "blood and thunder" tales.
The other Alcott mash-up novel you mentioned is totally different from mine. That author aimed for the juvenille audience and wrote a parody based on B movie vampires. She publically admitted that she did not research Alcott and her times as I did, and the results are extremely different.
In my opinion, there are other genres that are very similiar, like paperback romances. There is a very simple formula for plotting them, and when the names and setting are changed, you have a new book. The mash-ups have nothing in common except the stigma attached to them. Each author had a different reason for writing their book, and often, it was because they loved and wanted to honor the original.
You are quite right in your argument that you can't judge a whole subgenre based on one or two examples. As I said in the post, I never like to judge any book without reading it, and that I could really only speak about the first two mentioned. Some of them might be excellent, and some of them, not quite so well done. That being said, as a writer myself, I would jump up at any opportunity to take a book I loved and adapt it into something new, even knowing that a multitude of similar works already existed. I meant in my post to simply discuss how when a new idea is introduced, in any media, more of the same are always to follow, for better or worse.
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