... the urge to write sequels and prequels is almost always an homage of sorts. We don’t want more of books we hate. The books that get re-written and re-imagined are beloved. We don’t want them ever to be over. We pay them the great compliment of imagining that they’re almost real: that there must be more to the story, and that characters we know so well — Elizabeth Bennet, for one, or Sherlock Holmes, who has probably inspired more sequels than any other fictional being — must have more to their lives.Charles McGrath's essay on literary prequels and sequels entitled The Sincerest Form of Lawsuit Bait is at The New York Times and takes in Austen + Zombies as well as J.D Salinger's injunction to halt the publication of Fredrik Colting's 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.
McGrath notes that :
... Mr. Colting’s book has ... become a literary cause célèbre, with a number of legal experts, including one from The New York Times, seeking to overturn the judge’s decision. The argument is that the Colting text is “transformative”: that instead of being a mere rip-off, it adds something original and substantive to Mr. Salinger’s version.
