Books: Please please me – by ending this ceaseless flood of zombie crap.

According to the UK Gaurdian, publishers are poised to run the monster-mash up formula that proved so popular for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies into the ground. What's next from the pop-horror factory floor? Zombie Beatles.

From the Guardian:

Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison are starring as zombies and Ringo Starr as a ninja in the latest addition to the publishing's hottest, and oddest, new craze: the monster mash-up.

Alan Goldsher's Paul is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion has been snapped by US publisher Pocket Books for publication in June next year, following in the footsteps of the surprise hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was published this spring, and the forthcoming Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter and I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas, all out this autumn.

Goldsher's story starts in a Liverpool maternity ward in 1940, as a newborn Lennon is bitten by a zombie and doomed to wander the Earth for eternity. When he meets McCartney in 1957 he "bites off Paul's ear and sucks out his mate's grey matter, after which he spits a healthy amount of his own brain into Paul's carotid artery - and thus is born the greatest songwriting team in rock history," according to Goldsher's version of the encounter.

Harrison is quickly zombified, and "seventh level Ninja Lord Ringo Starr" is then welcomed into the fold. The Beatles enslave "hundreds of lusty teenage girls", invade the US where they mind-meld millions, releasing albums with hidden messages such as "Please please me by biting your young", "Dear sir or madam, won't you eat your neighbour", and "All you need is eternal life".

Their world begins to crumble when Lennon starts to date eighth level Ninja Lord Yoko Ono, and a band called the Zombies – whose members, Goldsher says, are not actually zombies - seeks revenge.

While it is nice to see that the criminally underappreciated Zombies get a little face time, it’s a shame to see the book hangs its plot on the old, crypto-racist "dragon lady that broke up the band" canard. Though, even that nod to yellow peril anxieties is forgivable next to the fact that it just keeps this interminable zombie moment dragging on.

Perhaps the irony here is that what made the Beatles so great – arguably the single greatest rock band to ever exist – was their originality.