In which trek reviews Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Ben H Winters describes his contribution to Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monstersas a kind of literary microsurgery. Taking Jane Austen's original Regency-era work, he added new text and (graphic) new scenes replete with frightening and formidable water creatures, of both supernatural and mundane descriptions. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is only about 60% of original Austen and about 40% surgical additions by Winters.

As a concrete example of this "microsurgery" on words, let us first take a look at the beginning of chapter one of Sense and Sensibility:

"The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home."

Next, let us examine the beginning of chapter one of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters:

"The family of Dashwood had been settled in Sussex since before the Alteration, when the waters of the world grew cold and hateful to the sons of man, and darkness moved on the face of the deep.

The Dashwood estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the dead centre of their property, set back from the shoreline several hundred yards and ringed by torches.

The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. Her death came as a surprise, ten years before his own; she was beating laundry upon a rock that revealed itself to be the camouflaged exoskeleton of an overgrown crustacean, a striated hermit crab the size of a German shepherd. The enraged creature affixed itself to her face with a predictably unfortunate effect. As she rolled helplessly in the mud and sand, the crab mauled her most thoroughly, suffocating her mouth and nasal passages with its mucocutaneous undercarriage. Her death caused a great change in the elderly Mr Dashwood's home."

All of that action before the end of the first page! (Yes, I am rapidly becoming ensnared by the new literary genre of monster mashups.)

The very strict manners and somewhat stilted language patterns common to Regency-era literature are both retained, lending a certain weightiness and formality to the action. Winters' adherence to Austen's style makes the insertion of the sea monsters nearly seamless; there is no awkward transition between his "voice" and hers. The melding of the two authors is so smooth that in a few scenes, the main characters deliberately ignore the proximity of impending sea monster attack because acknowledging their peril could be construed as bad form if not outright cowardly rudeness!

I kept waiting for the dark, scary, minor-key music to start playing.

Quirk Classics reports that while Mr Winters is available for media, Ms Austen is not.