lysdexic

It is tolerable, but not good enough. And it is only tolerable because a) most of the novel is just the original Austen and b) it has a creepily fetching cover that looks good on a bookshelf. However, they say a little goes a long way, and here it certainly does. Even though Seth Grahame-Smith's zombie insertions take up only a little of the novel, they go a long way in ravaging it.
Now, I do love parody (and horror), the more irreverent the better, and no classic is too good for one. So at first the idea of zombie warfare sounded fun, and if you want to get all academic, it made an interesting possible metaphor for the effects of 18th century marriage-by-duty. But this parody is neither fun nor clever. The new writing is atrocious. It tries to mimic Regency prose but ends up like a second rate fan fiction attempt with all the stereotypical stiff formality of that style, but none of the warmth or wit (barring one or two moments.) Mostly, the humor is reminiscent of the graffiti scrawled on toilet walls at my old secondary school. In a mashup the old and the new should slot into one another with ease, but here it reads as though Austen's work has been wrenched open to force the new into it. The result is a discordant, unfunny read. It feels like a cheap attempt by publishers to milk more cash out of a well-loved work. I wouldn't have a problem with this if the additions had any literary or humorous merit, but this parody is an unhappy alternative.
(P.S- In my rating of the book, the star exists only because it thankfully has left a lot of the Austen bits alone.)