The night when the five Bennet sisters successfully defended a party where Mr.Charles Bingley was also in attendance was a result of several years of training in the art of killing zombies. This training and its first applications are the focus of Steve Hockensmith’s book “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls”. Set five years before Mr. Bingley moved into Meryton, Hertfordshire, it is a prequel to Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
The story begins when Mr. & Mrs. Oscar Bennet and their five young daughters, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine, and Lydia, attended the funeral of Mr. Martin Ford, the local apothecary. Before the coffin could be lowered into the ground, Mr. Ford apparently decided he did not want to be buried as he started struggling to get out. He was unable to free himself though, as his legs were cut off. That was actually why he died. Mr. Ford was immediately killed again.
The incident reminded Mr. Bennet of his old promise to train his daughters in martial arts so that they could defend themselves from the dreadfuls, as the undead were called. He himself had been a ninja zombie slayer when The Troubles spawned the zombies. Now that he was aging, he had to pass the torch. Not having a son, he had no choice but to train his daughters in spite of the denigration of their neighbors that it is unladylike for women to fight.
Mr. Bennet engages young and handsome ninja warrior Jeffrey Hawksworth to be the girls’ trainer and their eyes were opened to a world of nunchakus, katanas, and shurikens.
Even a zombie-infested world, however, is not enough to quell the first stirrings of romance in the young girls’ hearts. They are smitten with their handsome trainer, yet they needed to focus on their training.
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