Saturday, January 23, 2010

Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers, or, The Monk's Second Tale

by J J Cohen

Chaucer travels. Not just into Farsi, not just into the present, not just into the apocalypse, but now into zombie fiction. From my morning email:
Dear Jeffrey Cohen
 
I’m Paul A. Freeman, a British writer, and I’m working on a ‘new’ Canterbury Tales project. My aim is to promote interest in Chaucer amongst both students and scholars of ‘The Father of English Poetry’.
 
My work chronicles the pilgrims’ return journey from Canterbury, and so far I’ve completed seven Tales, all in different genres, and varying in topic from fable to chick lit to crime / mystery.
 
‘The Monk’s Second Tale’, a horror ‘Canterbury Tale’, was published by Coscom Entertainment (a publisher of zombie horror) in November last year. It is currently being marketed to horror fans under the title ‘Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers – A Canterbury Tale by Paul A. Freeman’:

 
 
The three ‘Canterbury Tales’ pages of my website, beginning with www.paulfreeman.weebly.com/canterbury-tales-1.html give details of my Chaucer project, as well as including excerpts from the ‘return leg’ tales of the Squire, the Shipman, the Wife of Bath, the Doctor of Physic, the Knight, the Miller and the Monk. By glancing through these excerpts, you’ll discover that my ‘Canterbury Tales’ project is a serious undertaking.
 
Please feel free to share my website with your students (especially the ones more reluctant to tackle Chaucer), other Chaucerians, and anyone else you feel may enjoy or benefit from it. If you feel that your university / college library might wish to stock a copy or two of ‘Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers – A Canterbury Tale by Paul A. Freeman’, please feel free share this email with your librarians.
 
The goal of my project is to make Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales universally accessible, and to again popularize the tradition of storytelling through narrative poetry.
 
‘The Monk’s Second Tale’ is already available from Coscom Entertainment through Amazon, and at the end of the year my ‘Miller’s Second Tale’ will be published in an anthology of neo-medieval creative writing by Brepols Publishers, an academic publishing house based in Belgium.  
 
I look forward to hearing from you, and hope you or some of your students will be encouraged to consider ordering ‘The Monk’s Second Tale’, aka ‘Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers – A Canterbury Tale by Paul A. Freeman’.
 
All the Chaucerian best
 
Paul A. Freeman (www.paulfreeman.weebly.com)

2 comments:

Bavardess said...

Chaucer as chick lit? This I gotta see. I bet Alice makes the perfect postmodern sassy heroine...

Anonymous said...

Cool, I'm going to have to check this out. This reminds me of something my daughter showed me in a bookstore the other day, when, having consumed every recently-published bit of YA vampire fic, she was finally looking for something new to read. She said, "Hey mom! Here's a book called 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!'" I didn't believe her. But there it was - by "Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith."