TOP 3 BOOKS THAT WOULD MAKE AMAZING ZOMBIE- & HORROR MOVIES

3. Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill
I loved this book mostly because it surprised me right from the first page and kept me on this nerve wrecking leash throughout the story. First, everything I had read and heard about the book made me assume it was some Valentine’s Day psycho version. Totally wrong there. 

The story is basically about an old musician who decides to add to his home collection of snuff movies, human skulls and bones and occult artifacts, by online ordering a woman’s stepfather’s ghost. The supposedly ghost arrives in the old man’s suit and with that the nightmare starts. 

It could be a predictable story with two very stereotype characters; the old rock star with his leather pants, his ignorant behavior and his love for his dogs who he treat way better than his twenty somewhat year younger girlfriend slash fan slash ex stripper. 

Hill is a master of suspense and of character building making the douche rock star and his slutty girlfriend into a desperate and heart breaking couple in search for answers, bordering onto the world of the dead. 

2. Hanteringen av Odöda (Handling the Undead) by John Ajvide Lindqvist
The filming rights for both movie and tv-show were bought by the Swedish movie production company Tre Vänner AB back in 2005. Rumor has it that they’ve actually been filming the tv-show this summer and have asked to do some zombie extras during the Stockholm Zombie Walk on August 20^th. My only concern is that people tend to go for the traditional Romero zombie with the whole flesh-eating and blood dripping charisma. 

However, knowing the character of the undead in the original book they are nowhere similar to be found in a classical zombie walk. I hope the director and the production team have chosen to stay true to the original story because this could be even better than Låt den rätta komma in (Let the Right One In).

 1. Vampire Darcy’s Desire: A Pride and Prejudice Adaption by Regina Jeffers
OK, so I’m a huge sucker for Jane Austen novels and I loved the remake Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’m as annoyed as I am intrigued with the classics that’ve gone horror. And some with better results than others. So when I was combing the shelves at Powell’s Books in Portland, OR last November I stumbled across Vampire Darcy’s Desire. The cover is just awful, like a British version of a Harlequin cover and the story plot sounds really cheesy, even for a Romantic and Victorian fantast as myself: 

“This is the greatest literary love story of all time, transformed into a heart-pounding vampire tale of romance, lust, and danger. This inventive, action-packed novel tells of a tormented Darcy, dispirited by his family's 200-year curse and his fate as a half-human/half-vampire damper. Darcy meets Elizabeth and finds himself yearning for her as a man and driven to possess her as a vampire. Uncontrollably drawn to each other, their complex relationship forces them to wrestle with the seductive power of forbidden love. Meanwhile, dark forces are at work all around them, with the threat from George Wickham, the purveyor of the curse, a demon who vows to destroy each generation of Darcys and currently has evil intentions for the vulnerable Georgiana.”

 

But after having read a couple of chapters there was no denying that I loved it! It has all the elements that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies only touches on the surface; the unspoken passion between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet that grows into a hands on erotic passages. The beast versus the lover within Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth’s struggles between morals and passion alongside with full on zombie battles when the demon and necromancer George Wickham decided to return to his childhood village and raise the dead from their graves. 

I’m confident that Vampire Darcy’s Desire would make a far better movie than Pride and Prejudice and Zombie, though I look forward to whichever zombie adaption of the classic novel that’ll be displayed first.