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In this case, a stupid novelty. What's interesting about the zombie book is that it's put an otherwise tiny publisher into the position of selling over 300,000 copies of a book in an otherwise damned industry. (For reference, a small publisher is lucky, and happy, to sell over 1,000 copies of a title.) All the power to them, but it isn't sustainable.
This isn't entirely new. Authors have even wrote "sequels" to classic works. Films have been "sampling" from Shakespeare (Clueless, etc.). The publisher I work for produced a book by a musician who did a "cover" of a Thomas Hardy novel. Shakespeare himself can be said to be "sampling" from his source tales. I think there are even services where you can have a company produce a classic book (such as Austen) where you replace characters' names with names of your friends and family.
What we see here with the zombie book is, I assume, a sloppy, sensational example of it. Otherwise, "sampling" in a literary aspect is perhaps more subtle and often cryptic compared to other art forms. (Or maybe I will say it should be.)
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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