Dawn of the Dreadfuls
Prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Steve Hockensmith

Readers will witness the birth of a heroine in Dawn of the Dreadfuls - a thrilling prequel set four years before the horrific events of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. As our story opens, the Bennet sisters are enjoying a peaceful life in the English countryside. They idle away the days reading, gardening, and daydreaming about future husbands - until a funeral at the local parish goes strangely and horribly awry.
Suddenly, corpses are springing from the soft earth - and only one family can stop them. As the bodies pile up, we watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naive young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. Along the way, two men vie for her affections: Master Hawksworth is the powerful warrior who trains her to kill, while thoughtful Dr. Kekilpenny seeks to conquer the walking dead using science instead of strength. Will either man win the prize of Elizabeth's heart? Or will their hearts be feasted upon by hordes of marauding zombies? Complete with romance, action, comedy, and an army of shambling corpses, Dawn of the Dreadfuls will have Jane Austen rolling in her grave - and just might inspire her to crawl out of it!

While this book was written by a different author than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I have to say, that it keeps well with the tone of the original. The characters have the same feel as they did in the other book and it flows well from this one into the next one. It's not disjointed and you really can't tell that it has a different author. Even more impressive is that this is a completely new and original novel and doesn't incorporate another work into it as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did.

Everything in this novel is spot on. From the characters, to the plot, to the way it meshes up well with it's sister novel. This is an impressive work and quite a fun read. While you won't be reading a changed classic as with it's sister novel, you will be reading a fantastic piece of horror-comedy.

I highly recommend this novel to anyone who is a fan of the genre or of anything zombie, but even though this is a prequel, you should definitely read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies first. There's a reason they did the prequel as the second novel in this series and it works better to read them in the order they came out.

My rating: Four out of five snails.