So, I was sitting in English class today, poring over Henry David Thoreau’s Transcendentalist classic Walden, when I had a brilliant idea. It was the kind of brilliant idea that comes without warning, a bolt of electricity shocking the torpid mind of a college senior in a freshman English class at 8 am on a Tuesday. That kind of idea. You know what I mean. And the idea was this:
Somebody needs to turn Walden into a horror-fantasy novel along the lines of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Think about it for a minute.
…
Genius, right?
He's halfway to zombiehood already. Look at those circles under the eyes.
Walden, for those of you whose minds and imaginations also occasionally drifted off during your 8 am English courses, is a book (nonfiction) about a man who lives in almost perfect solitude in the woods for two years, communing with nature, building rickety shelters for himself, and all around disappointing the parents who put him through Harvard.
But take this 19th-century intellectual, Henry David Thoreau, place him in a post-apocalyptic landscape of roving bands of hungry zombies, and you’ll never look at Transcendentalism the same way again (“I went to the woods to live free of the undead,” or something like that).
I can see Thoreau escaping his little Northeastern town, overrun by hungry corpses, and hiding out at Walden Pond for his survival. But, being Thoreau, and feeling all at one with nature in his hermit-like life, he finds himself realizing that the zombies have it right: They suck all the juices and marrow out of life like real men (literally). The following is an actual quote from the real Walden:
I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way.
Thoreau naturally grabs his buddies Emerson and Whitman, and joins the zombie hordes just long enough to get brutally dismembered and die screaming. But they lived, you know? They followed their own Truth. They didn’t conform to the conventions of a society that told them to run from the undead parasites taking over the world. That’s the path to a life of quiet desperation.
Anyway, I think Walden‘s in the public domain, so: somebody get on this.*
* 50% of royalties to me, goes without saying, amiright?
Tags: book review, book reviews, Books, classics, ebooks, fantasy, fiction, henry david thoreau, horror, humor, Science Fiction, thoreau, vampires, walden, zombies
Recommendations welcome.
I would read this. I would read this and give it to my friends as a birthday present and then make them read it.
This would definitely be a huge improvement on the original Walden.