X Meets Y/Literature

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Language meets page:

Examples

Works

• Orson Scott Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker is Carnivale meets Little House On the Prairie, with dash of Alternate History.
• The Inheritance Cycle and its film adaptation, Eragon, are often described as "The plot of Star Wars in the setting of The Lord of the Rings". A little too "Star Wars" and a little too "The Lord of the Rings"... and a little too Raph...
  • It's also been described as "A Star Wars rip-off plot in a Lord of the Rings rip-off world with Earthsea rip-off magic and Pern rip-off dragons."
• The Warhammer 40000 novels Gaunts Ghosts are "Warhammer 40000 meets Sharpe", while Ciaphas Cain is more "Warhammer 40000 meets Flashman meets Black Adder". Warhammer 40000 itself can be described as "absolutely everything meets absolutely everything", not so much Darker and Edgier as "paints itself black and hurls itself over the edge".
• A review of Good Omens compares it to "the Book of Revelation as penned by Monty Python's Flying Circus".
• Alexander Gordon Smith's Escape From Furnace is The Great Escape meets Warhammer 40k.
• The Judas Strain: National Treasure meets Die Hard meets James Bond meets 28 Days Later, meets G.I. Joe.
• Temeraire: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell meets Patrick O'Brian.
  • Alternately Dragonriders of Pern meets Horatio Hornblower Master and Commander, since Word of God says it originated from Aubrey-Maturin Slash Fic. Which explains a lot.
  • One of the reviews on the back calls it "Like Jane Austen playing Dungeons and Dragons with Christopher Paolini," which makes one wonder if the reviewer even read the book.
• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is The Pied Piper of Hamelin meets Mrs. Frisby and The Rats of NIMH meets Watership Down.
• The Thursday Next series, despite apropos-of-nothing comparisons to Harry Potter and Bridget Jones's Diary on the back cover, is really more like Hot Fuzz meets Monty Python's Flying Circus meets Last Action Hero WITH BOOKS. And Blade makes a series of cameos.
  • The early books in the in-universe version of the Thursday Next series are described as "Dirty Harry meets Fanny Hill, but with a good deal more sex and violence."
  • Nursery Crime is Shrek meets CSI.
• Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel is William Faulkner meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with foetal alcohol syndrome and lots of moonshine.
• World War Z has been described as Children of Men, meets Syriana, meets Night of the Living Dead.
  • Or Night of the Living Dead as done by Ken Burns.
• The Goodness Gene is "1984 meets Brave New World", but with more conspiracies and clones.
• Coraline is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland meets The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Or alternatively, Alice meets Kafka.
  • Even better is probably Alice meets A Nightmare On Elm Street.
  • Alternately, Through the Kabinet and what Alice Found There. The fact that the film version was directed by Henry The Nightmare Before Christmas Selick helps.
• Anthony Trolloppe's The Way We Live Now is Pride and Prejudice meets Watchmen.
• Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is... Exactly What It Says On the Tin.
• The House of Night: Twilight meets Sailor Moon meets Harry Potter
• Twilight itself is Bram Stokers Dracula meets My Immortal (or My Immortal minus Harry Potter)
  • Alternatively it is Bram Stokers Dracula meets Beauty and The Beast .
• The Complete World Knowledge series has been described as Pale Fire, as directed by Wes Anderson.
• Subverted in one review, which said that if Tim Burton reimagined The Phantom of the Opera'... it would still fall far short of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
• The Codex Alera is Avatar: The Last Airbender meets Pokémon with just a bit of Rome for flavoring and some yeerks Zerg thrown in.
  • By design. Jim Butcher has said that he was challenged to write a good story that combined the concepts of the Lost Roman Legion with Pokémon.
• Eaters of the Dead is intentionally Beowulf meets Ahmad ibn Fadlan's travelogue.
• Beat The Reaper is Burn Notice meets Goodfellas meets House written as darkly as possible.
• Stationery Voyagers is Heroes meets Star Trek meets Veggie Tales meets The X Files meets Underworld meets Blade Runner meets DP 7 meets...well, you kinda get the idea.
• Atlanta Nights is The Eye of Argon meets those trashy paperback novels you see at the grocery store. If you pick it up in the Dramatic Reading aisle, you'll be able to get some ham with it.
• CS Lewis and others have described Fanny Price of Mansfield Park as "a Charlotte Bronte heroine lost in a Jane Austen novel."
  • Among his most famous works The Chronicles of Narnia is Alice in Wonderland, meets The Bible.
• The Looking Glass Wars is American McGee's Alice meets The Lion King.
• The blurbs on The Dresden Files books describe them as "Harry Potter starring Phillip Marlowe." This, as it happens, is dead wrong, since aside from the coincidence of names, the series bears almost no resemblance to Harry Potter. It's more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the Old World of Darkness, starring Phillip Marlowe. Incidentally, some of the later blurbs do have this.
• Speaking of which, the Nightside series is The Dresden Files meets Neverwhere.
• 1984 is We meets Brave New World meets Darkness At Noon.
• Penthouse is Playboy meets Hustler; Basically the gloss and glamor of Playboy, and the explicit poses of Hustler.
• The Lady Grace Mysteries are Trixie Belden meets The Royal Diaries
• The Girl Who Owned a City is (a curiously non-violent) Lord of the Flies meets Atlas Shrugged
• Joe Hill's You Will Hear The Locust Sing is intentionally The Metamorphosis meets Them
• Cross The Amazing Race and The Westing Game, plus add history on the side, and you get The 39 Clues.
• The Word and The Void is what happens when Terminator meets Urban Fantasy in a Dying Town setting.
• A Song of Ice and Fire is The War of the Roses set in Middle-earth
  • Alternately, Dune set in Middle-earth.
• The Third Policeman is what James Stephens' (another Irish author) absurdist fairytale The Crock of Gold would be if it was retold by Salvador Dali to Mark Z. Danliewski.
• The Pendragon Adventure has been described as Harry Potter's American cousin meets Stargate (the whole franchise) meets The Time Tunnel meets Battlestar Galactica Reimagined with bits of Back to The Future, The Matrix, Planet of the Apes, and The Godfather thrown in for good measure.
• Laura und der Silberwolf (Laura and silver Wolf) is Pans Labyrinth in a Medical Drama setting. The Finale is also similar
• 10 A BOOT STOMPING 20 A HUMAN FACE 30 GOTO 10 was described by a reviewer "...reads as if someone cloned an amphetamine-addled Philip K. Dick and told him to come up with his own version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity."
• Hero by Perry Moore is Sky High meets X-Men meets The Incredibles
• Undead by Kirsty McKay is The Breakfast Club meets Night of the Living Dead during a school ski trip in Scotland.
• The Roman Mysteries: The author describes it as The Famous Five plus Nancy Drew meets Gladiator.
• Chick Tracts is Christian fundamentalism meets Warhammer 40 K meets South Park.
• Percy Jackson and The Olympians is Classical Mythology meets Harry Potter.
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth is Night of the Living Dead meets The Giver, or Survival Horror meets Dystopia.
• Rivers of London is Neverwhere meets The Bill.
• When the Windman Comes is Coraline meets Bridge to Terabithia. With Happy Ending.
• Captain Underpants: Superman meets The Ren and Stimpy Show meets Invader Zim meets Recess
• Meg has often been described as Jurassic Park meets Jaws
• Artemis Fowl has been described by its author as "Die Hard with fairies".
• The Automatic Detective combines every Film Noir trope with just about every Raygun Gothic trope (albeit, the latter is fairly deconstructed).
• Rhymes With Witches is Mean Girls meets Sabrina the Teenage Witch meets Flowers for Algernon.
• Gone is X Men meets Lord of the Flies.
• Sorbet is Inception meets Groundhog Day meets Night of the Living Dead.
• The Hunger Games is Lord of the Flies meets Survivor.
• Harry Potter is Young Wizards meets Grease.
  • Alternately, it's Young Wizards meets Jennings, with the latter's Not Allowed to Grow Up replaced with massive amounts of Darker and Edgier.
• The Musicians (Muzykanci) by Andrzej Sapkowski is The Bremen Town Musicians meets The Music of Erich Zann.
• Matched is Nineteen Eighty Four meets The Giver.
• The Kite Runner is A Separate Peace set in Afghanistan with a lot more honest narrator.
• Enchantress From the Stars is Star Trek meets Avatar

Characters

• Edward Cullen: Dracula and/or Spike meets Itsuki Koizumi meets the My Immortal version of Draco Malfoy and a disco ball. Maybe throw in some Heathecliff, too. But without the irony of Heathecliff's character.
  • Bella Swan is Ebony Meets The Kimberly
• According to his author, Grand Admiral Thrawn is Erwin Rommel meets Robert E. Lee, Hannibal Barca, Alexander the Great, and Sherlock Holmes. Thrawn's intelligent. But unlike Alexander the Great, he isn't a crybaby.
• The Nac Mac Feegle are smurfs meets Violent Glaswegians.
• Pextel is Arnold Perlstein meets Cyclops meets Peter Petrelli.
  • Liquidon is Legolas meets Ted Sprague meets Mohinder Suresh meets Nightcrawler meets Edward Cullen, only much less abusive to his girlfriend; and he glows rather than sparkles.
  • Cindy is a Lighter and Softer parody of Selene mixed with Cliff Secord, only she has Liquidon in the place of a rocket. Her Mosquatlon race are parodies of Underworld vampires, just to drive the point home. Her namesake is Cindy Campbell from Scary Movie.
  • Neone Delft is Aurora meets Odette meets Rahab the Harlot meets Eliza, with Gepetto (Hidicky) for a father, one who has gambling issues. Her archnemeses are a ruthless gangster who laughs when he makes Swiss cheese of his victims (Pentacko), a cross of Macbeth with Sylar (Cybomec), and a combination of Maleficent with Rothbart and Rasputin (Irendus). As if Nest / Don Bluth / Disney / what-have-you weren't being abused enough, Neone temporarily forges an alliance with a certain Friar Rubberion. And her Mantithian form looks very mildly like a certain Hot Gypsy Woman...
  • And Pinkella turned out to be a little bit Claire Bennet and a little bit Jasmine and a little bit of a subverted Cinderella.
• Harry Dresden is John Constantine meets Spider-Man.
• Peeta Mellark is a Michael Cera character in a Battle Royale scenario.