Sherri Browning Erwin

I hate Jane Eyre, book and character. The novel is a feminist literary critic's bible, and Jane is a smug, sanctimonious shrew. It is one novel I thought I could never bring myself to read - until now! Sherri Browning Erwin's monster mashup of Charlotte Bronte's novel is a clever idea, wittily executed. Practically the whole original text remains intact, but the gothic undertones are made flesh, quite literally - the Reeds, Jane's mercenary, snobbish relatives, are revealed to be vampyres! show more That scrap she gets into with her cousin John is actually the first test of her 'Slayre' instinct, to fight and destroy all bloodsuckers (and reunite them with their mortal souls in heaven - the religious blather stays in). Her fellow 'inmates' at Lowood are zombies, raised from the dead by Mr 'Bokorhurst', a witch doctor, to be farmed out as servants - guess what happens to that 'darling angel' Helen Burns... And Mr Rochester, her new employer, hides a deeper, darker secret than a madwoman in the attic - Bertha is a werewolf! At last, it's possible to feel sorry for Rochester when he neglects to tell Jane the truth about the pyromaniac on the third floor. The rather pathetic twist of fate that leaves Jane a wealthy, independent woman after being rescued from her own stupidity by her long-lost cousins still occurs, but St John Rivers sets up a school for junior slayers, and Jane helps him to teach young girls how to defend themselves and correctly wield a stake.

The supernatural inserts are completely random, but they also work - Jane was born to slay vampires, that's why she has such an attitude problem! Rochester accidentally married a werewolf, no wonder he has to keep his first wife locked in the attic! The transition between Charlotte Bronte's Victorian writing and Sherri Browning Erwin's additions and amendments is for the most part seamless - the first paragraph becomes: 'There was no possibility of continuing my walk that night. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour after dark, but since Mrs Reed had picked up a scent (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, hunted early), I was sent home so the others could stalk their prey.'

An ideal substitute for the real thing, when the real thing is not to your taste. 'Android Karenina' will hopefully work the same magic! show less

I REALLY wanted to read this when it was first released. Just the title switch of 'Jane Slayre' and that cover! I was in. Been sitting on my TBR shelves for ages. But with the crazy crisis happening, the least I can do is indulge and read the books I want to read the most, in the hopes that I can focus better, instead of doing what I usually do; which is create this vast mathematical equation in my head of what I should be reading based on various factors. So yes, this book is wonderful. show more Imagine Jane Eyre and Buffy as one character. YES. It is the basic premise, story layout and characters of the amazing, beloved original 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte, but full of monsters. Let's be honest: the original 'Jane Eyre' already contains a few monsters and the original Jane Eyre is also a badass. The concepts are seamless -- fits like a custom made lace Victorian glove to Jane's tiny hand. Honestly, I wish there was MORE monster mayhem. The writer has a lovely enough way with words herself, doesn't really need to adapt the books of others, but nothing can really beat the purple-prose-before-it-was-out-of-fashion that is the writing style of the Bronte sisters. I have such love for the original, so it's difficult to tell if I can separate this story from the original. But this was fun - a great way to revisit. show less

I have this teeny weeny soft spot in my heart for mash-up fiction. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, sea monsters...okay, not so much sea monsters. Although if someone were to mash up Jane Austen and Jaws, I'd probably be there. But because this soft spot is so small, there's not much room for challenging what I like.

If you write a book with any one of these aforementioned beings in the title, I kind of expect it to heavily feature that, and that alone. No one wants to read a book called show more Gatsby: Werewolf Hunter (I made that up) and have it be partially about zombies. It just doesn't fit. Universes should not cross unless explicitly stated.

So here's where it gets tricky: Jane Slayre. Now...I think "slayer...or slayre" and generally think vampires. Unless it's Buffy. Also, the bloodied heroine on the cover (an edited image of Charlotte Brontë) is holding a stake. And on the cover, right below the title, it says "the literary classic with a blood-sucking twist." Vampires, right?

There are! There are vampires! Aunt Reed and her progeny are all children of the night. The book starts off right. Until it veers into the very wrong. If you've never read the source material, it's a pretty big book and it's pretty dense. This means two things: 1) there's not a whole lot of room to play. If you're going to retain most of the source material AND add supernatural elements, you've gotta integrate it very well and keep any additions slim, and 2) you have to make it move; no one wants to read a 400-page mash up of Jane Eyre with dead spaces (haha). Unfortunately, co-author Sherri Browning Erwin took the latter fact to mean that she had to pack it as full as possible with supernatural beings.

So along with vampires, you've got zombies and werewolves. Let me say that again: vampires and zombies and werewolves (oh my). This makes the poor book just fall apart. If she'd stuck with one lore to kind of tie the whole thing together (one ring to rule them all, if you will) it could have worked. But you've got Jane training herself to kill vampires (with the aid of her slayer/Slayre blood of course!), a school teacher training her to kill zombies (which becomes necessary because, along with Brocklehurst - Bokorhurst, here - being a religious zealot/ asshole, he's also apparently a witch doctor who makes zombies), and then some nonsense about her slayer/Slayre uncle also happening to know shit about werewolves.

It's just...it's a lot. It's a whole lot. And we've got enough going on. I mean...Jane Eyre is already a gothic novel. There is already a sort-of-ghost, and a crazy wife in the attic who burns shit down. Not to mention all the horrible human beings who already play a part in the original. And it's so Emo, it doesn't need any help. Yet here we are. Trying to make things more interesting. It doesn't need it! All this additional stuff does is make Jane more of a bad-ass (which doesn't fit, because she remains emotionally immature) and make Rochester more of a wimp (which he's not!).

This is not me being elitist. I mean, I can be, but this is not that. Mash-up fiction is supposed to be fun. This is not fun. This isn't as bad as Amanda Grange's Mr. Darcy, Vampyr, but it's still not fun. Good mash-up should still retain the potent qualities of the original. For example, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Elizabeth is pretty bad-ass because of her zombie-killing training in China. But Elizabeth was already pretty bad-ass and put Darcy in his place more than once. It works! This doesn't. This is just messy in all kinds of ways. No more, please. show less

This is the third of the recent group of classic romance/horror humor mash-ups I've read and it is the very best of them. It succeeds in being a fun, light read because it avoided the traps of the almost-good "Pride & Prejudice & Zombies" and the waste of paper and time that was "Sense & Sensibility & Sea-monsters". No cheap jokes, no junior high sex puns, no glaring and stupid mistakes in the additions, no missed opportunities, and no pointless, tedious grafting onto the original story. The show more humor is dry, understated, and dovetailed nicely with the original voice of the main character.

That Ms. Erwin not only has read Jane Eyre, but understood and appreciated it, was apparent in her handling of the original material. (I think part of that understanding and intelligence is indicated by the proper spelling of her first name). She maintained qualities of the original characters and, while indicating the humor of the new situations in which she placed them, she never ridiculed or insulted them (I particularly liked her transformation of Mr. Brocklehurst -- it was everything I could desire). I didn't have a single eye rolling moment and my curiosity about how the story would develop and end remained high until the last few pages answered all.

I've read Jane Eyre several times since my first foray in 6th grade. When I first read about this book, I speculated that the Brontes might be better suited for such a mash-up. Their writings are much more emotional, excessive, and interwoven with Byronic Romanticism and Gothic motifs. These made room for adding in the changes without overstretching credulity (not the case with the two Austen mash-ups, which required much subtler humor and, being tighter and less prone to emotional broad strokes, had less room for what was sledged into them.)

Quite a good, fun, light summer read. show less