From Cracked.com:
So there’s a Swedish man named John David California in the news lately, who is currently being sued by J.D. Salinger. For those of you unfamiliar, this story is notable because Salinger is the Literary Sasquatch: He’s so elusive you could pose children with a cardboard cut-out of him and start a roadside attraction. So what made contemporary literature’s most eminent ninja emerge from the mists of obscurity? It seems Mr. California wrote a sequel to Salinger’s opus work, The Catcher in the Rye… without Salinger’s permission. Some would call this revolutionary, some would call it sacrilege and some would call it uninteresting and largely irrelevant, but regardless of the name with which you dub it, this represents a potential turning point for modern literature: The novel is finally borrowing some moves from film, and it’s about goddamn time.
Since Mr. California’s already kicked things off, let’s go with his approach: The biggest problem with novels is those annoying authors who, once penning a masterpiece, cite some bullshit like “creative integrity” and then just ditch the concept after only one measly book. I say why not milk that money shake until the straw makes gurgling noises? And if the author isn’t down for sucking off his creation until money spurts out all over his face, well, why not deal with that shit like Hollywood–where the studio keeps all rights to franchises regardless? What if Coppola didn’t want a sequel to the Godfather? Fuck him, that’s what. The execs would’ve just given it to Stephen Sommers, who’d have promptly rewritten Michael Corleone as a giant sand-shark.
Sequels are like a license to print small bills just so you can spit on them and throw them at poor people. If publishers take up this practice as well, think of all the great works we could be reading right now! We could be perusing the action-packed Dickensian sequel we’ve all wanted to read, 2 Cities 2 Furious. Or laughing it up to The Retard, the light-hearted followup to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Hell, that Swede already called dibs on Catcher in the Rye 2: Rye Harder–if he’s smart enough to throw some titties in there and maybe have Holden Caulfield learn magic from a vampire, he’ll have officially won writing.
Edit: attribution added -nb
