In Quirk Books's follow-up to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, co-authored by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Ben H. Winters teams up with Austen to plumb the salt-water depths with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Here he answers a few questions we posed:
On your nightstand now:
Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell and Dark Places by Gillian Flynn--both contemporary fiction, both super enjoyable. Also, I became a big fan of Jules Verne while writing Sea Monsters, and I'm finishing up The Mysterious Island.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I don't know if the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook counts. If not, I'll go with The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. I must have read that book a hundred times.
Your top five authors:
Charles Dickens, P.D. James, Mark Twain, David McCullough, and (hoping I can include one playwright) Martin McDonagh.
Book you've faked reading:
Robert Caro's three-volume Years of Lyndon Johnson. I kept talking big about how I was going to read it, until my wife called my bluff by buying all three volumes for my birthday. Now they're in my closet, taunting me. Bluff called!
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. Anytime someone talks about Midnight's Children, I do that annoying thing: "If you liked Midnight's Children, you'll love The Tin Drum."
Book you've bought for the cover:
Seamus Heaney's verse translation of Beowulf (great sea monster story, by the way). It's this warrior's face, draped in chain-mail, and it makes you go, "This isn't musty old poetry--this is action/adventure!"
Book that changed your life:
I used to read Dave Barry's syndicated column in the Washington Post and buy the collections when they came out. He really made me laugh and inspired me to start writing funny things. I'm sure I shamefully ripped him off when I wrote my college humor column.
Favorite line from a book:
It's hard to pick one line, but the section in David Copperfield where David gets drunk for the first time is my favorite funny passage in literature. "I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair--only my hair, nothing else--looked drunk."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
What it's like co-writing with Jane Austen:
Infinitely rewarding. Austen is clever, decorous, and very funny in her own sly way. In other words, she's the perfect straight man.
Type of sea monster you'd most like to encounter again:
I had a lot of fun creating the "Devonshire Fang Beast"--mostly in foreshadowing it. I think I shall miss him most of all.
Type of sea monster you'd least like to encounter again:
There's this nasty demonic sea-scorpion thing that attaches itself (literally, not in the Austen sense) to one of the protagonists. That thing freaks me out.
What was the most fun part of this assignment:
Seeking out the delightful vocabulary words Austen might have used to describe the monsters, if she had included them in the first place; words like "mucocutaneous" and "bioluminescence."
