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Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters: Book Trailer
Austen vs. Winters: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
For the past few years, one of the hottest trends in music has been to take two popular songs and mash them together to create something new. It started in the clubs, worked its way to the Internet, and has now gone mainstream with shows like Fox’s Glee. And now we have that same trend hitting the literary world. It started when Quirk Books published “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, which became a surprise hit, mixing Jane Austen’s classic romance with an all new zombie subplot. From that success, now comes “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”, with author Ben H. Winters taking the timeless tale to places the original author surely could not have imagined.
The tale uses the general plot structure of the original novel, “Sense and Sensibility,” setting it in an alternate universe where sea monsters exist and other creatures of the ocean have turned against humans due to an incident referred to as The Alteration. The novel follows the character of Henry Dashwood, who is due to set out on an adventure to find out what caused the Alteration. Unfortunately, he is killed on his journeys, dying at the jaws of a hammerhead shark. Before taking his final breath, Dashwood makes arrangements for his son–who inherited his estate–to care for his wife and three daughters. His son reneges on his word at the behest of his wife, however, leaving Dashwood’s family in distress. They relocate to a cottage in Devonshire, a place well known to have the highest per capita population of sea monsters in the country. There Elinor and Marianne find love and adventure as they battle both the basest instincts of treacherous men and the violent notions of creatures from the sea.
While all of this may seem a bit silly, it is handled by the author by presenting the story as a biting satire of Regency era England, rather than as either a full bore parody or a straight horror novel. The book, in fact, has seen its share of praise from the major critics, with both Publisher’s Weekly and The Onion’s AV Club giving it high marks for the deft storytelling.
