I actually don't mind some "revamping" of the canon in the various novels that came out from the late '60's through today. After all, "Marilyn (or is is Marylin?) Ross" created his own parallel universe in his various DS novels. Few followed the canon, especially as the series of books progressed. They certainly weren't literary classics but us young fans who bought them devoured them. Of course, there were the horribly drawn Gold Key comic books. Don't forget the year-or-so-long daily and weekend "comic" series that appeared in newspapers. It was well drawn, but the plots were awful and as far from canon as could be. Yet, no one trashed any of this; it has all been held in various forms of esteem at keeping the series alive and out there.
As I stated, I truly enjoyed Angelique's Descent. I thought it was a marvelous novel and for the most part stuck with the canon. Were there tweaks, especially at the end? Of course. The equally marvelous Hawkes Harbor had its tweaks. Considering the inconsistencies within the TV series, tweaking has been necessary. As for "AD," I thought Ms. Parker did an incredible job with one of DS's biggest inconsistencies: Barnabas, by 1796, was around 40 years old, yet had a nine-year-old sister. That would take some "crunching of the numbers" especially regarding Naomi's "birthing hips," yet Ms. Parker explained it. She crunched (as I'm sure Naomi also had to) and it worked. Ms. Parker looked at what the childhood of Angelique was like and even did it with controversy, the main one being that Angelique was mulatto. Her mother was an African slave woman; her father was a French plantation owner (from what I recall). That's some heady stuff. Good for Ms. Parker. Why would some skinny white girl be a witch? Better Ms. Parker's explanation (she received her supernatural abilities from her mother who was a voodoo queen) than from the DS "canon" from the messed-up 1840/41 plot where she was a witch going back to at least the 1600's (if she was so powerful, how did she end up being a servant girl a hundred years later? - she needed to have a conference with Samantha and Endora).
I didn't like Ms. Parker's later novels not because they so much traveled from the canon, but because they were poorly written. No, I didn't like having Elizabeth being a flapper and movie star and some such stuff in the 1920's, when she was born, according to canon, in 1917. That would make Liz over 60, at least, when the series began. There are other things to pick at. Sometimes canon is absolutely necessary. And tweaking the canon is also absolutely necessary. If Dan Curtis and the PTB stuck with canon, we would've had an entirely different series. After all, Josette died in the 1830's according to canon. Then, when the Barnabas plot took a soap opera low in the ratings into high (if not the highest) in the ratings, suddenly she died 40 years earlier. And don't forget that Julia, Barnabas and Eliot so drastically changed not only the time-line but also the family history in 1840/41, that when they returned to 1971, none of the Collins family the knew and loved would've been there.
Gerard