Week Six: Genre Mashups

Dare I mention Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith? Literary romance meets zombie horror fiction. Pretty much what's on the box and the archtype for mashups: this is literally Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, with zombies grafted in. This is the book that inspired a thousand remakes, just see Android Karenina or Little Vampire Women.

For a purely original take, there's Andrew P. Mayer's steampunk superheroes in The Society of Steam trilogy (The Falling Machine, Hearts of Smoke and Steam, and Power Under Pressure). The books take place in an alternate 19th century New York protected by the "gentlemen adventurers," the Society of Paragons and populated with megalomaniacal villans, mechanical men, and clockwork mechanisms galore. The books' heroine, Sarah Stanton, follows a superhero-like character arc, wrestling with many moral choices given the chance to discover the hero within herself.



Kermit T. Bond [source]