Literary Fun, Courtesy of Jonathan

Last week, Jonathan sent me a link to a great post titled “Hybrids.” Here’s how it goes:

Not the cars. Here's a thought, though: take one part of a story, and insert it in another.

Examples:

Clyde from An American Tragedy goes to England, and meets Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice. She gets pregnant, and he pushes her out of a canoe to her drowning death.

Captain Ahab visits Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain. They wander the desert together, and Ahab attempts to destroy the Grand Canyon by filling it in. He dies flinging himself into it. Alternate: Moby Dick visits Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain and dies promptly, filling the desert with the smell of a rotting albino whale corpse.

A slight shift:

Environmentalists and Pentecostals exchange epistemologies. Pentecostals oppose dancing because there is a global shortage of it, and it is contributing to climate change. Environmentalists oppose SUVs because God might.

Any more ideas?

Well, that sounded like too much fun for me to turn down, so I immediately began trying to compose my own hybrid. Here’s my contribution to the site:

After Rhett leaves her, Scarlet changes her mind about going to Tara and decides to vacation in Monte Carlo instead. While there, she meets and marries Maxim de Winter (from Du Marier's Rebecca) and returns with him to Manderley.

She immediately dismisses Mrs. Danvers and sends for Mammy. She soon gets fed up with Max's depression and, since, frankly, she doesn't really give a d@*n about him, one night she dresses up in Rebecca's old clothes and scares him into a heart attack.

For months, she revels in her ownership of an English estate AND a Southern plantation, but the evil Mrs. Danvers returns and sets the house on fire. Scarlett wakes up but thinks she's just having a nightmare about the siege of Atlanta. She goes back to sleep and perishes in the fire, leaving both estates to Mammy.

Well, I was pretty pleased with that one, but, of course, my mind just wouldn’t leave it alone, and later that night I came up with this one:

Tired of studying all the time, Victor Frankenstein, instead of going to University at Ingolstadt as his family intended, secretly made his way overland to the coast and boarded a ship to see some of the world.

After a few weeks he grew bored and, for no particular reason, shot an albatross. The ship was immediately becalmed, and soon running out of drinking water, the crew all died. Just as Victor was about to breathe his last, he luckily remembered that he had stored all his scientific equipment in the hold of the ship. Although the crews’ bodies were badly decomposed, he was able to harvest from among them enough usable body parts to reanimate a “skeleton” crew to sail the ship, which he immediately commanded to take him back to harbor.

To Victor’s horror, he discovered that he was powerless to control the newly reconstructed crew and that, rather than take him safely to the nearest port, they had made plans to sail the North Seas in hope of discovering a passageway to the Pole.

Victor hid below deck, writing notes in his scientific journal and waiting for his chance of escape, which finally came when the ship, too far North, became iced in. By this time Victor had suffered much mental anguish, and although he made it safely back to civilization, he spent the rest of his days obeying a strange compulsion to seek out wedding guests and relate his life story.

See, I told you this was too much fun. You should try it, but I warn you. It's addictive!