Dr. Allen Grove, AU's own zombie authority

Zombies are everywhere, and AU Professor of English Dr. Allen Grove is officially part of the phenomenon. Students who pick up a copy of the recent "Heirloom Edition" of the strange mash-up novel "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Jane Austen and Seth Graham Smith can flip to the end of the faux-leather volume to find Grove's afterword on the novel, which addresses the reasons behind the recent popularity of zombies and the ways in which it actually fits right in with Jane Austen's texts.

Quirk Books, who published the book, contacted Grove last spring to offer him the job. "At the time I was teaching Tales of Terror and Jane Austen, so the project was a perfect match for my interests, and I've often taught and written about Jane Austen's relationship with early Gothic fiction," Grove said. The publishers hired him on the spot upon hearing his ideas for the piece, and gave him a week to write his afterword.

He also got the opportunity to do a radio interview with Viewpoints, a production by Media Tracks, shortly following the afterword's completion. He was invited to sit in with both Graham Smith and Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels upon which the HBO series "True Blood" is based, and discuss vampires and zombies and their current popularity. Grove discusses his theory on zombies in particular in detail in his afterword.

"Our fear of and fascination with destructive diseases (AIDS, swine flu or those caused by biologic weapons, etc.) is made explicit with zombies," Grove says. Using the presence of the "undead" in fiction also "plays into our fantasies of violence. We need feel no guilt when we behead, crush and blow up zombies. There is perhaps comfort in having an unambiguous and irredeemable enemy. And, of course, on a metaphorical level, we are all zombies going mindlessly through the day-to-day grind."

The Viewpoints interview is available online at http://www.mediatracks.com/vp0925/ and the hardcover heirloom edition of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" is available in bookstores.