This news is about a month late, but I’m still excited for it:

The title is self-explanatory. It’s Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, except with added bits where they fight zombies, written by Seth Grahame-Smith (author of How to Survive a Horror Movie).

When I first heard about this at the end of January, I said “Nothing about this can fail.” Now that I’ve had awhile to think about it, however … I’m a little more worried, for the same reasons I don’t like fanfiction: I generally hate it when people muck around with a story I liked, whether adding to it or fleshing out secondary characters or writing alternate endings or drawing in romantic relationships between characters. (I’d make an argument about disliking the Star Wars prequel movies, but that’s too easy.) For this book, I’m concerned that the zombie bits won’t be woven in with the original plot, the cuts will be too sudden and too bizarre, and the whole thing will read more like a clever way to cash in on the trendiness of all things zombie.

Of course, I don’t know much about this book other than the cover image (which ROCKS ZOMG) and the blurb on the publisher’s site. I hope that the transitions will be seamless, the writing superb, and when it’s out we’ll all wonder why Austen didn’t include the zombie parts in the first place. Until then … we wait, in fortified top-floor safe zones with weapons and a full pantry. With scones and tea.

[Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is published by Quirk Books and due out June 1, 2009. Preorder it on Amazon.]

While the big story of the day is how long the lines are at polling stations, there was no line when I went to vote at 10:30 this morning, despite my scarf and book and other preparations. Walking to the poll place, voting, and walking back home took less than half an hour, but there was a line when I left and I heard there was a line stretching around the building earlier this morning. I’d say about 20 voters and another 20 poll workers were in the building when I was there.

It was wonderful and exciting to see so much support for Obama, talk to so many people who were on the way to or from the polls, hear about record voter turnout in spite of possible problems with machines or ballots or whatnot. Maryland uses Diebold touch-screens, unfortunately. I hear Florida’s gone to a Scantron system with a paper trail.

Today I’m stuck at my desk, so I’m watching CNN.com, the Shapely Prose open thread, the Making Light open thread for burning off nervous energy, and William K. Wolfrum of Shakesville bravely liveblogging Fox News’s coverage. The excitement has died down this late in the afternoon, when many people have already voted and are busy taking care of the day’s business, and many others haven’t gotten to the polls yet.

This morning I was caught up in it, too, and wore my “I Voted!” sticker and Obama button as long as I could.

Tonight I’ll be parked on the couch with a glass of wine, watching results come in. Come on, Obama landslide!

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I’m in a nice neighborhood.

I have a love-hate relationship with the venerable Bloom. I like his writing style. It’s easily readable, but erudite; he uses the proper word at the proper time, without showing off or dumbing down. The sheer mass of his work, as a writer and editor, implies that I should have a basic familiarity with his critical perspective. I want to know who he is and what drives him. You don’t crank out that many books without passion.

But he’s a Freudian. Is any literary critic seriously Freudian anymore? Especially in Shakespeare? I thought most Shakespeare critics were New Historicists or some other postmodern thing. At least Jungian.

And from the little I’ve read so far in Invention of the Human, he thinks Hamlet is, to coin a phrase, the shit. I mean, Hamlet’s a great play, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of Shakespeare. And Hamlet’s a great character, but let’s face it, he spends half the play moping.

Bloom and I are going to have a lot to discuss.