Hey everyone. Hope you enjoyed whatever holiday you chose to celebrate if you chose one. Anyway, I figured I’d share this Lovecraftian short story I wrote for my Intro to Short Story class this fall semester, since it isn’t serving any real purpose for me besides being part of my archive of school work. This was my only creative writing assignment in the entire class. The rest of it was a crash course in feminism and Marxism. I had the opportunity to edit it for extra credit by the end of the semester, but didn’t take it. This story isn’t particularly great, so head’s up. I also removed my professor’s and my names from it, so it’s just the story.
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I read through the story nice work but you might want to change some of the names regarding the deitys and ancient magus who wrote the spell book (Necronomicon) as these are identical characters that Lovecraft created.
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I do believe even when he was alive Lovecraft gave other authors the freedom to utilize his mythos for their own writing. At this point I think his works are outside of copyright.
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Although true it might be prudent to change the names around a bit so you don’t have a plagiarism issue as it is a school project and might be checked over by the instructor who would grade it down or dismiss the paper.
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Not all of them.
Anything HP wrote circa 1922 and earlier is public domain, but anything after that seems to be claimed by Arkham House (the main publisher of his work).
Be aware that some of the creatures in the Cthulhu Mythos were not created by Lovecraft himself, but by members of his writing circle, and those are still within the copyright of the authors’ estates.
Also, some aspects of Lovecraft’s mythos have been trademarked by a variety of video game, board game, and RPG companies so using some things can get you sued (Call of Cthulhu, for instance, is trademarked)
To be safe, create your own characters and your own monsters, but set them in Lovecraft’s universe. That’s what diverse authors such as Ramsey Campbell, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Charles Stross have done, and that is what HP Lovecraft himself told people to do. The Mythos is wide, and always open to original weirdness.
Edit to add: I believe stories like this are protected under “fair use” in a way similar to how fan films can use trademarked and copyrighted characters. It’s only if you are publishing the work, or making money from it in some way, where it becomes an issue.
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Good point.
lol if you’re into that, you may want to Google the following 2 bolded phrases, separately, before investing too much into Lovecraft:
“were trodden out of national existence” lovecraft
“and called the thing a” lovecraft
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