HispanicBusiness

A new zombie Jane Austen novel and steampunk westerns are on tap for February, according to Suzanne Johnson at Tor Books. American literary lion Mark Twain might have been particularly glad to hear about the undead Jane Austen subgenre. He hated her.

"Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone," Twain once remarked. "It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death," he added a few years later.

Anyway. Zombies. Zombies! In Jane Vows Vengeance by Michael Thomas Ford (Ballantine, Feb. 28), our erstwhile gothic gal needs to let her fiancé know that she's not just dead, but undead. She also needs to get away from Lord Byron and Charlotte Bronte -- and who could blame her?

The Westward Weird anthology, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes (Feb. 7 on DAW), features Civil War battle bots, miners in a parallel universe and other oddities of the steampunk genre.

Rounding out the pack: shipwrecks, hungry beasts and a middle school telling of Jack London's adventures at the hands of murderous pirates.