Possession

What happens when a novelist writes a follow-up to someone else’s novel.

- KRISTEN ROUPENIAN

Elizabeth Hand's "A Haunting on the Hill" (Mulholland) is, the book jacket notes, "the first novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House." Authorized by whom? Not by Jackson, who died in 1965, but by her heirs. "A Haunting on the Hill" is, therefore, a ghost story conjured by representatives of a deceased author's estate. It all sounds a little uncanny.

Isn't that the case, though, whenever we try to resurrect dead writers? In the past decade, a resurgence of acclaim has fully established Shirley Jackson as the queen of dark literary fiction, and there is no surer sign of an author's success than the arrival of a new generation of writers eager to channel her spirit, rereading and reimagining her work. So much for the death of the author. These days, it seems, fan-fiction writers start posting their rewrites the moment a book leaves the printer-sometimes over the author's vociferous objections.

Yet not a few literary classics, too, are constructed as revisions of previous ones, typically works in the public domain. Think of how Jean Rhys revised Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" in "Wide Sargasso Sea,"excavating a Caribbean backstory for that madwoman in the attic. Or how J. M. Coetzee broke apart "Robinson Crusoe" and rearranged the pieces to write "Foe." Or how Peter Carey pillaged Charles Dickens to create "Jack Maggs," with its title character based on the escaped convict who, in "Great Expectations," turns out to be Pip's secret benefactor.