Amen, brother. This has all the earmarks of the Widow Adams and Doug's publisher wanting to milk the last possible bit of money out of a longstanding cash cow. Trying to continue a beloved, one-of-a-kind story and set of characters without the original author being alive to do it is a mug's game; ask the poor lady who wrote Scarlett, the alleged sequel to Gone with the Wind.
But I have to disagree with you on the whole "writer vs. storyteller" dichotomy; I don't see that they are necessarily exclusive. In fact, most of the best writers I can think of are also at least decent storytellers; Joss Whedon, Spider Robinson and the late Bob Heinlein leap to mind.
I'm not saying that they're mutually exclusive AT ALL, as concepts; I'm just saying that in practice, some authors are better at one than the other. Douglas Adams, for all his excellence, was NOT a great storyteller, or even a good one really. It simply didn't interest him. He preferred to string together his awesomely strange observations with the loosest stories possible. Douglas opened his books with statements like "In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." What kind of serious story could come out of THAT?
If you're trying to emulate his prose (and why even tackle this franchise if you won't?) you have to throw out everything you know about storytelling FIRST. Not as an afterthought. And for a lot of professional authors (again, I can't judge Colfer specifically), that's the hardest thing to ever do.
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But I have to disagree with you on the whole "writer vs. storyteller" dichotomy; I don't see that they are necessarily exclusive. In fact, most of the best writers I can think of are also at least decent storytellers; Joss Whedon, Spider Robinson and the late Bob Heinlein leap to mind.
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If you're trying to emulate his prose (and why even tackle this franchise if you won't?) you have to throw out everything you know about storytelling FIRST. Not as an afterthought. And for a lot of professional authors (again, I can't judge Colfer specifically), that's the hardest thing to ever do.
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