Industry sources say that any updates would usually be done in agreement with the author. But that isn’t always the case. RL Stine – who wrote the multimillion-selling Goosebumps series of horror novels – reacted with, well, horror when it was revealed in 2023 that his work had been “sanitised” without his input. In Dahl style, one fat character went from being “plump” to “cheerful”; “crazy” became “silly”; a character who was described as having “at least six chins” turned into one who was “at least six feet six”. And the text was also silently made contemporary: a Walkman was replaced by an iPod, lest any readers be stumped at the thought of putting a cassette in a portable music player.
Lois Duncan, the author of the 1973 bestseller I Know What You Did Last Summer, had in the years before her 2016 death made some such revisions herself. “I loved going through the novels,” she said in 2010, “and giving the characters cell phones and computers, and changing their clothes so they were no longer wearing polyester pantsuits. And of course I changed the dialogue slightly so that it sounded more contemporary.”
Jonny Geller, the chief executive of the leading literary agency Curtis Brown, tells me that he doesn’t like this habit of retrospective book fiddling. “Even a historical novel set in the 1990s should be accurate,” he says. “How are we ever going to look back and know what it really was like to live in that time, if we keep trying to go after the attention span of a very young person who doesn’t know much?”
Geller points to the surge in popularity for David Nicholls’s 2009 novel One Day, after Netflix released a 2024 TV adaptation that remained faithful to the book’s original 1990s setting. The novel, he says, had been “a big success among young people. I think they revelled in the period before phones and email. So I think it’s possible to attract young readers… to fiction that’s older than 20 years and not have to update it.” To do otherwise, he adds, is “patronising, and actually quite damaging about our perception of previous generations and the world they lived in”.
