Spectator competition winners: reader, I ate him: literary classics/horror mash-ups

The latest comp, which called for extracts from a mash-up of a literary classic of your choice and horror fiction, was a nod to the recently deceased George Romero but also owes a debt to Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which weaves scenes of ‘ultraviolent zombie mayhem’ into Jane Austen’s original text. Most chose prose classics, but there were a few distinguished exceptions. Here’s what happens when, courtesy of Matt Quinn, the undead get their chops round Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a stroganoff? Oh how we zombies joke! I want your heart, but not for lunch – for love! My sweet, don’t scoff, I’ve followed you all night. I’d fall apart…

And here’s a taste of George Simmers’s take on Rupert Brooke vs the zombies:

If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. I shan’t be Tempted to walk undead, with mind congealed, With staring eyes and zombie’s shuffling gait, Condemned to chumble hungrily and roam In a most sorry and un-English state; I’ll lie snug in my grave and think of home…

Nathan Weston’s Werewolf Hall, Brian Murdoch’s The Gruffalo in Transylvania, Bill Greenwell’s Three Men and a Zombie and Nick MacKinnon’s The Nightmare of Casterbridge were witty and well crafted, and all were in with a shout for a place on the winners’ podium.