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See this book listing on AmazonMonsters (OK, mostly vampires) have been all over every kind of screen lately. Jane Austen fans, meanwhile, have had four new TV adaptations and the unintentionally hilarious Lost in Austen to pick over. Capitalizing on a likely overlap between these audiences, Quirk Books (famed for the "Worst Case Scenario" series) released Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- "restoring the lost scenes of Zombie mayhem" that somehow got edited out back in the early 1800s. No vampires, because that would be too obvious.

Admittedly under pressure from the (well-founded) threat of imitators, Worst Case Scenario author Ben H. Winters was tapped to come up with a follow-up, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is the result. Still no vampires, because that would have been too obvious.

Read Chapter One of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Mild Spoiler Alert! Consider yourself warned.

Anyway...

Winters reveals the new book's backstory in a Slate confessional that tantalizes and disturbs. (Like Dr. Watson's cryptic reference to the case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, we can only hope the world will one day be ready to learn of Jurassic Mansfield Park.) That's the tantalizing part, wherein Ben discusses what he decided not to write, and recounts his preparatory reading of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson and H.P. Lovecraft.

That's also where it starts to get a little out of hand. When I noticed this book was coming out, I wondered, "Why not use Persuasion, the Jane Austen novel that actually features sea and sailors?" Anticipating this caveat, Winters concedes the landlocked nature of Sense and Sensibility's Devonshire setting, but finds Persuasion a less fertile ground for satire.

The fun of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies consisted specifically in seeing just how little the original needed to change to make room for the 10% zombie mayhem. A similar amusement awaits in Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen -- how the "rediscovered scenes" can be worked in without affecting the rest of the story, or ever being spoken of again. But since the Dashwood girls never get near salt water in Sense and Sensibility, Ben had to do slightly more editing:

In Austen's original, the Dashwoods, upon their disinheritance, are invited to live in what is essentially the guest house of a wealthy relation, Sir John Middleton. In my version, their move is to Pestilent Isle, part of a vast archipelago controlled by Sir John—now an elusive explorer/collector with a beard "as white as the snows of Kilimanjaro" and a necklace of human ears.

The long, central portion of Sense and Sensibility takes place in London, a bustling cosmopolitan capital in Austen's time as in ours. I needed to transfer that big hunk of story to a location that could represent all that London represented for the Dashwoods and also be beset on all sides by hideous sea monsters. My answer was Sub-Marine Station Beta, a great domed city planted on the floor of the ocean, "the greatest engineering triumph of human history since the Roman aqueducts." (Ben H. Winters)

Jules Verne's lavish descriptions of the undersea fantasy world are as inspiring and uncannily prescient as Winters says. But Sub-Marine Station Beta is overthinking the whole Austen crossover thing -- as is sticking poor Col. Brandon with a face full of tentacles. Doesn't the guy have enough trouble being taken seriously, even while blessed with the face of Alan Rickman?

Read Chapter One of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters