5 Mashup Novels That Offer Worthy Twists on the Originals

Crooked, by Austin Grossman
Richard Nixon has been mashed up before, but Grossman’s inspired novel presents a maniacally logical twist on the paranoid, self-hating Nixon persona. With a pitch-perfect imitation of Nixon’s voice, Grossman imagines a universe where eldritch abominations in the Lovecraftian mold not only grant the United States its power to dominate the world, but also threaten to destroy it if that power falls into the hands of the wrong country—or the wrong political party. Between us and destruction, the novel imagines, stood for a moment Richard Nixon, a man shut out of the true halls of power and ultimately forced to accept that his role in history would be as villain, even as he sacrifices everything to save the world.

Move Under Ground, by Nick Mamatas
Equal parts Jack Kerouac character study, On the Road-slash-Beat pastiche, and Lovecraftian horror novel, Mamatas’ inventive mashup not only pits a shattered, alcoholic Kerouac against ancient horrors rising out of the ocean to destroy the world and the insane cult that wants to assist in the process, but also famous figures like Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs, evoking a manic sense of true alternate history, with Kerouac embarking on another road trip, this time to save the world.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
The high-profile mashup novel that started the phenomenon, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies remains one of the best of the type, transforming the original text of Austen’s classic novel via the insertion of zombie hordes, while leaving much of the original story and style unchanged. The zombie-fighting is rendered believably and with great care, erupting at moments in the story where the presence of “unmentionables” enhances rather than destroys the prim sense of etiquette and language that has made Austen’s novel a classic. It’s a delightful surprise for anyone who has read the original (which is, of course, just about everyone).

Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James
A few years before zombies invaded Pride and Prejudice, James wrote an unofficial sequel that revisited Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth six years after their wedding and plunged them into a murder mystery. While more of an unofficial sequel than a mashup, James does make great efforts to mimic Austen’s style in the context of a whodunnit, and explores the effects and process of investigating a homicide within the universe and with the characters that Austen created, resulting in a book that definitely has that mashed-up energy.

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
Fforde’s Thursday Next novels are slowly evolving into one ginormous literary mashup with every other book ever written, as the line dividing Next’s “real” world from that of literature gets thinner and thinner with each novel. In The Eyre Affair, a device that allows people to enter the fictional worlds of novels is used by a terrorist: he steals the original manuscript of Jane Eyre and uses it to snatch Jane from her own story, causing every copy of the novel to suddenly end with Jane’s unexplained disappearance. Wildly imaginative and always unexpected, the book proves Fforde is a mashup artist of a whole other caliber.