Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Quirk Books £8.99 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Patient Zero
By Jonathan Maberry
Gollancz £9.99, 424 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99

World War Z
By Max Brooks
Duckworth £8.99 352 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

The Living Dead
Edited by John Joseph Adams
Night Shade Books $15.95 487 pages

The ball at Netherfield is going well. Mr Bingley is charming company, though the haughty Mr Darcy is a highly disagreeable fellow, in Elizabeth Bennet’s opinion. Then, suddenly there’s an interruption: “A chorus of screams filled the assembly hall, immediately joined by the shattering of window panes.” In comes a horde of shambling, flesh-hungry zombies – and the evening is ruined...

If that doesn’t sound quite like Jane Austen, it’s not. It’s a passage from a new pastiche, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith.

Though it takes place in a world of empire-line dresses and exquisite etiquette, the scene is not so much classic novel as classic zombie attack. And the book goes on in this manner: the freshly self-exhumed undead lurch in from the outside to gorge themselves on the living. For this is not the 19th century but a new world – and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is just one of a recent glut of books that brings that very modern supernatural monster, the zombie, clawing and groaning its way into our 21st-century lives.

Zombie fiction may be relatively new but zombies are not. The idea originated in Africa and, during the 15th and 16th centuries, was brought over with the slave trade to Haiti. It became an established part of voodoo culture – in this tradition, a reanimated corpse is mystically given a shuffling semblance of life.

The present-day pop culture version of the zombie dates from the late 1960s and has a single point of origin: Night Of The Living Dead. Directed by George Romero, this seminal horror film – and the sequels and imitations that followed – established the “ground rules” for the modern zombie archetype. The dead rise from their graves, for reasons no one can fathom, and crave human flesh – preferably brains. One bite from a zombie and you become one too. Can you stop them? Only with a bullet to the head or outright decapitation.

Night Of The Living Dead came out in 1968, a year of worldwide social upheaval. Many critics divined satirical parallels between the film and the Vietnam war, the death of the hippy dream, and the student protests in the US and in Paris.

Why, then, have the past few years seen a rise in the number of zombie-related films, computer games, comic books and novels?

In their mutilated, decomposing frames, zombies seem to embody the great anxiety of the age we live in. As in 1968, they are symbols of all that we dread: conformity, mindlessness, disease, apocalyptic calamity.

Every era gets the horror myth it deserves, which reflects it like a distorting mirror. The Romantic period had the scientific nightmare of Frankenstein and his creation. The Victorians, obsessed with sex and death, had the vampire. We, in our jittery, post-9/11 age, have zombies.

The zombie is an archetype still in flux, however. It has not yet matured to become fixed and rigid. This is an interesting moment precisely because, depending on the artist’s perspective, its meaning is still malleable. The zombie is as nebulous and unformed as many of our own fears and horrors of the early 21st century.

In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the zombie exaggerates the social critique already present in Austen’s novel. But it’s also outrageously transgressive and subversive. That’s why Grahame-Smith’s mash-up of kickass horror-action tropes and literary comedy of manners is such a winning idea, in theory if less so in execution.

Here, the Bennet sisters aren’t hapless damsels waiting to make a good marriage. They’re skilled in martial arts and able to wield sword and musket as well as any man. They wouldn’t need to inherit their father’s money, even if that were an option: “All five of them were capable of fending for themselves ... they could make tolerable fortunes as bodyguards, assassins or mercenaries if need be.”

It’s amusing to insert into Austen’s text zombie references and some smutty doubles entendres, albeit scandalous to some Janeites. The trouble is the joke doesn’t sustain itself over the length of a novel.

The original Austen prose still constitutes about 80 per cent of the book. When Grahame-Smith makes radical changes or invents whole scenes, they’re bold and funny: Darcy cripples Wickham as punishment for mistreating Lydia; Elizabeth and Lady Catherine fight a duel to prove the former’s worthiness to marry Darcy.

It might have been better if the author had written an all-new zombie novel featuring Austen’s characters. As it is, the contrast between gory undead ultraviolence and mannered gentility loses its potency.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has been an unexpected bestseller, which publishers have been quick to emulate. Zombified versions of A Christmas Carol and The War Of The Worlds are soon to appear.

Zombies aren’t useful to authors simply as a means to inject comic bathos into the classics, however. Jonathan Maberry is a horror writer whose books include Vampire Universe (2006) and Bad Moon Rising (2008). In Patient Zero, Maberry takes the zombie more seriously than Grahame-Smith. Fully cognisant of, and reverential towards, the existing lore, he also puts his own spin on the monster.

Patient Zero is a fast-paced techno-thriller that posits a genetically engineered disease communicable via bodily fluids – and therefore by bite. The plague engenders all the standard Romero-zombie attributes in its victims: apparent death, raging appetite for flesh, inhuman strength and near-invulnerability to harm.

Further reinforcing the association between zombies and modern fears, Maberry’s novel sees al-Qaeda terrorists use the disease as a bio-weapon to strike against America. That the terrorists are the dupes of a greedy western pharmaceuticals magnate adds a further layer to the metaphor.

This is a wonderfully overblown novel. Its indomitable hero, Joe Ledger, is prone to the odd moment of self-doubt but, by and large, he gets the job done, swiftly, lethally, with minimum fuss. His best friend is a psychiatrist and therapy is repeatedly invoked to deal with the ghastliness of combating the walking undead.

That peculiarly American quirk notwithstanding, the novel delivers zombie mayhem aplenty. The duration and intensity of the living-versus-unliving set pieces escalate all the way to a crazy climax at a July 4 celebration where the president’s wife, no less, is under threat from a large crowd of sightseers-turned-biteseekers.

Implicit in Patient Zero is the notion that zombies could be – indeed are – us, the clumsy, milling rabble we may degenerate into if we’re not careful. And that’s one reason why the zombie archetype is so effective: zombies represent the worst in humans – the only difference is that zombies, of course, are dead.

Echoing our contemporary fears – not least with the current swine flu outbreak – zombies and disease are good partners. Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006) also employs disease as the root cause of the zombie affliction.

Here the contagion is not man-made but a natural pathogen that mutates beyond control. But when it spreads, encompassing the world in a matter of weeks, transmission is indeed down to human failings. Again, we see the horrors of our time projected on to fiction: a solitary, localised outbreak becomes an unstoppable planetary pandemic because of people trafficking, trade in illegal organs, government corruption and inefficient bureaucracy.

The novel is told as oral history. Through excerpts of interviews, people recall their involvement in pivotal moments over several years of the crisis in which the walking undead almost overwhelm the living, and the human race shrinks.

Amid the turmoil and slaughter, some are prepared to do anything to survive. A Canadian woman recounts how her father traded a radio with neighbours for “a big bucket of this steaming hot stew” – that’s human hot pot, we infer.

The humour, of which there is a surprising amount, is pitch-black and laden with irony. Israel, for instance, gathers as many Jews inside its borders as it can, then builds a huge wall around itself, in effect making a Gaza Strip of itself; a black South African describes a plan to save his nation, an updated version of a real-life proposal once drafted to protect Afrikaners in the event of a black uprising.

World War Z is the epitome and pinnacle of zombie fiction. Brooks, son of film director Mel, treats the subgenre with respect and intelligence and does everything right. Where most zombie fiction focuses on a small band of humans battling to survive, World War Z is a widescreen vision and all the better for it. Brooks’s zombies are credible and horrible, and there are just so many of them – million upon million.

Sheer numbers is another reason why zombies are so scary and so pertinent to their 21st-century audience. Earth, after all, is perilously overcrowded. And the arrival of great numbers of the undead means even less space to go round and more mouths to feed – and we, the animate, are on the menu.

To our contemporary palate, then, the fear is not of single villains so much as multiple horrors. This idea is played out in an anthology of zombie stories, The Living Dead. The authors in this anthology are mostly fantasy or horror writers – some specialise in science fiction, others in horror or gothic novels. And though these genres are typically dominated by male authors, and have a primarily male readership, nearly a third of the contributors in this instance are women.

The best pieces here are those in which zombies appear en masse. They work because the stories stick to Romero’s template and follow his satirical lead. And again, these narratives bring the zombie to life in more ways than one, through the world’s problems.

In Dan Simmons’ outstanding “This Year’s Class Picture”, the zombies are schoolchildren into whom a possibly deranged teacher is trying to instil some learning. In Michael Swanwick’s “The Dead”, zombies are the social underclass. The zombies of Poppy Z Brite’s “Calcutta, Lord Of Nerves” are India’s untouchables; in Norman Partridge’s “In Beauty, Like The Night”, they are porn-mag centrefolds. The best known writer in this collection, Stephen King, tells a lovely tale of islanders off the coast of Maine who contend with a Romeroesque zombie uprising.

In 1988, Kim Newman, film critic and sometime horror author, published Nightmare Movies, a compendious survey of modern horror cinema. He wrote then that zombies can “at once epitomise and chastise any number of vices: conservative complacency, consumerist frenzy, mindlessly instinctive political positions, random violence, pointless greed”.

Zombies, in that sense, are the proverbial blank canvas. And as the 21st century advances, more and more zombies keep shambling our way. On to the empty deadness of their faces we may project everything that we hope we are not – and everything we fear we may be.

James Lovegrove’s novel ‘The Age Of Ra’ is out in July (Solaris Books)