Cthulhu Mythos question

Are you asking about Lovecraft's canon or the video game?

Ballantine's been pubbing anthologies, and there are a couple other HPL homages out there (AW's williemeikle has several), but I'm not sure who holds the copyright to HPL's canon.

Please, someone who games correct me on this, but since there is a game out there, you might run into issues with the license for the Mythos game.

Basically, it looks like all HPL's work is now in the public domain. There are of course bits of the Mythos by other hands - Ramsey Campbell, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth etc - so you might want to be careful about things based on their contributions.

Just looking at the various RPG supplements out there from a host of different companies, I very much doubt you'd run into trouble.

Thanks, torgo.

Um, you might get an argument from the guys who own the copyright to the game The Call Of Cthulhu regarding ownership of HPL's copyright. I believe there are legal entanglements still riding from HPL's estate, August Derleth's assumption of HPL's copyrights, and various sundry and other legalities stemming from the complicated legal brew that HPL left behind when he died.

The copyright owners of The Call Of Cthulhu gaming license might hold the strongest current claim as they have continued to publish new Lovecraftian material and to keep the old material in the public eye and in publication for at least 20 years or so.

If the question is, can I just go ahead and steal something Lovecraft wrote - don't do it. It will be recognized for what it is and you will be bludgeoned for it unmercifully.

If the question is, can I use portions of the Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos for my own use, go ahead so long as you don't plagiarize anyone else in the process. Be careful. There are a helluva' lot of Lovecraft-based and Cthulhu Mythos-based stories out there and everybody and their brother thinks they can write one. The line needed to be tread has become very, very fine.

Lovecraft is published by pretty much anyone and everyone these days.

But the mythos is something he didn't create, though he stirred the pot a little. If you're dealing with writers like Bloch or Lumley, for instance, their copyright might still be valid.

Blarg you'll get argument there. While August Derleth can be credited for creatinng the mythos, he credited Lovecraft for the basis for the mythos. Bloch wrote contemporaneously with Lovecraft, but his mythos tales are almost entirely based on Lovecraft's mythos. Lumley came much later and, while credited with adding to the mythos in places, is also disparaged in other places for his "contributions"..

Overall, the Cthulhu Mythos is directly attributed to a series of stories crafted by H.P. Lovecraft as well as stories by others that he either largely rewrote or contributed to substantially in some manner (largely through correspondance with the originating author).

The way I've seen the Mythos described comes mostly from Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi's "The Evolution of the Weird Tale" and various of his essays. He largely frowns upon the mythos (he can't refer to it without quotation marks) and its scattershot attention to and alignment with its inspiration and source material in Lovecraft's own work. He's not the only one to believe Derleth's many posthumous "collaborations" with Lovecraft were largely self-serving pastiches of questionable quality that took advantage of Lovecraft's name for personal gain.

Joshi makes a point of the difference between encouragement and the level of contribution others such as Derleth might claim or imply to their own works and fictional worlds.

For instance, Lovecraft and his circle traded little things like names back and forth. Lovecraft refers to a cult of "Klarkash-Ton" as a tribute to Clark Ashton, for instance, and introduces a "Robert Blake" into a story as a tribute to Robert Bloch, who himself names a character Luveh-Keraph. But that is fun between friends. Lovecraft would never, for instance, have embraced the turning of his concepts toward an embrace of religion and a human-centered teleology.

Lovecraft is a little like Bruce Lee, in a way. Lee created a new and extraordinary martial art he did not set down systemically, and when he died young it was claimed by everyone to their own purposes. Within a generation it was unrecognizable.

Bloch was 16 years old when he first contacted Lovecraft, and knew him, via correspondence alone, for about four years before he died. We could say he was a contemporary of Lovecraft technically, but really Lovecraft was more an inspiration and mentor.

I've got Daniel Harms' "The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia" on the way (been back ordered for a month or so by now), and will be interested to read his takes on the mythos. I've got plenty of mythos stories in the "to be read" backlog, too. I'll be getting more of S.T. Joshi's critical studies of Lovecraft and weird tales as I get my out-of-control kindle spending more in line with what I can really afford.

You might also want to check out "The Annotated Lovecraft". I do agree that Derleth did not significantly contribute to the Mythos though his greatest contribution was in keeping Lovecraft's work alive. HPL would likely have been appalled at the way some authors turned his Mythos into a pseudo-religion and anthropomorphized his alien "gods" as well as the human-centrism that some works show. However, some of that can be justified by the need for "character" in stories and the authors own human-centrism. Lumley's "The Burrowers Beneath" and "Clock of Dreams" novels and their myriad offshoots were certainly guilty of human-centrism and humanizing Lovecraft's Mythos as well as building a sort of pseudo-religion around the Mythos. As much as I liked "The Burrowers Beneath", Lumley's follow-on works did more harm than good imnsho and the entire series is largely ignored by todays Mythos community. Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu games and supplements, as much as I like them as well, also score high in the "religionizing" of the Mythos.

The Annotated Lovecraft sounds a treat.

There's an astonishing amount of Lovecraft-related material out there. I'm definitely trying to keep my reading directed to the closest core of original Lovecraft and Lovecraft ideas as possible before letting my energy dissipate on watered-down Lovecraft homages and ideas. I did pick up "Black Wings -- Tales of Lovecraftian Horror" for a more modern dose of Lovecraftian horror. And there are some Lovecraft stories I haven't read yet which I'm sure I'll go back to, like "The Whisperer in Darkness."

Regarding the need for character in stories, Joshi points out Lovecraft's own defense of the flatness of his characters -- his indifference to humanity in the largest sense, reflective of his concentration on the cosmic scale, in which humans are necessarily of trivial import. His protagonists, then, serve essentially as footnotes in their own stories and lives. I'm not sure I buy it. It sounds a little like building an escape hatch to excuse characters from being dull. And most people are intensely interested in their own lives and emotions, no matter how trivial. If nothing else, where we ourselves in our inner lives are concerned, we tend to harbor and manifest intense feeling -- all the more so when Cthulhu comes knocking at the front door, I'd guess.

I often like Lovecraft's worlds and horror effects more than his overall tone or his characters. And I'm open to writers who make the personalities of their protagonists more than footnotes.

While staying on the sidelines of the general discussion, I wholeheartedly recommend the anthology Shadows over Baker Street, in which a bunch of incredibly talented writers offer stories on the premise: "What if Sherlock Holmes got tossed into HPL's universe?" Some of the best treatments of the canon I've read. And I've also read nearly everything out there, with the exception of the Chaosium materials.

I remember seeing that book on Amazon a while back. It has extremely strong reviews (that don't seem faked).

I've never read a single review of it. I saw it while browsing in the library one day, read it in very few sittings, and immediately bought my own copy.

Do they tend to have Holmes still in London, or does he come to the banks of our own dear Miskatonic?

Shadows Over Baker Street is an astonishingly good anthology. Too damned many good stories in that one to even begin to single any one of them out.

Of course, you have to like both Lovecraft AND Sherlock Holmes, but - da-amn! Talk about two of my favorites. The only thing better might have been Phillip Marlowe and HPL.

FOTSGreg said:

Shadows Over Baker Street is an astonishingly good anthology. Too damned many good stories in that one to even begin to single any one of them out.

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<trots off to amazon...>

The only Joshi I've read was Lord of a Visble World, which was a survey of Lovecraft's correspondence. I enjoyed it immensely and still go back to it every couple of years.

If you're not into comics, you might have missed Alan Moore's recent release, Neonomicon. I also enjoyed that immensely. Good Alan Moore is better than just about anyone, IMO. As a side note, Moore is insanely scholarly. If you're into that sort of thing there's an annotated version of the first chapter of the Neonomicon, which was published separately as The Courtyard. I read that after I read the Neonomicon and was duly enlightened. I didn't catch half the references, and I've read just about everything Lovecraft ever published.

FOTSGreg said:

Shadows Over Baker Street is an astonishingly good anthology. Too damned many good stories in that one to even begin to single any one of them out.

Of course, you have to like both Lovecraft AND Sherlock Holmes, but - da-amn! Talk about two of my favorites. The only thing better might have been Phillip Marlowe and HPL.

Click to expand...

If you want Marlowe/HPL there's that movie Cast a Deadly Spell, I believe, with Fred Ward.

I quite liked S.O.B.S. - Gaiman's story is particularly brilliant; there are a couple though ("The Black Dagger" or something was one?) which are pretty awful.

I was just coming here to ask the same question. I was planning a short story that was inspired by / using the mythos of Lovecraft, especially in regards to C'thulu and the Mad Gods in a fictional story. I wouldn't be using Lovecraft's own work, and would have original characters and settings, but would this be troublesome? Or do the copyright debates specifically relate to reprinting/using actual stories written by HPL?

Anjasa, you wouldn't be using Lovecraft's work, you'd be using original characters and settings? This is troublesome only in the idea of where the Mythos comes in at all.

If it's your own setting, characters, and doesn't involve Lovecraft's work, then it's your work and nobody can say a word about it.

If you reference the Old Ones, the Elder Things, Cthulhu or some semblance thereof (and C'tulu would be as automatically recognized as Cthonians as being referenced heavily to Lovecraftian horror), then you're referencing and drawing from Lovecraft.

Many writers did it. Many continue to do so today. I would think you were on safe ground as long as you did not directly pull from nor plagiarize Lovecraft or anyone else.

That's pretty much what I figured.

The only reason it would come into play at all would be a mysterious force driving a character insane, but I know drawing from other's work is always kinda sketchy and I'd rather not get into any issue with it. Definitely wouldn't be using any characters/settings/works of Lovecraft but for the vague references and influences of the Old Ones.

Haven't worked out everything, of course, since I wasn't sure what would be okay and what wouldn't, but I figured I'd be treading fairly lightly.

A mysterious force driving a character insane is broad enough I doubt you'd have to worry. If so, we'd have to accuse Lovecraft of stealing from Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla."

Not sure if it is in the aforementioned baker street antho but Neil Gaiman did do a wonderful short story set in the Cthuhlu universe called 'A study in emereld' which is also a rewrite of the Conan Doyle story A study in Scarlet. It is worth a read. He also does a couple of other stories set in the mythos in his own anthologies (Shoggoth's Old Peculiar is especially worthy, it can be found in Smoke and Mirrors).

Charles Stross has a series of books called The Laundry series (the first one is called the Atrocity Archive). They also use a lot of Lovecraft ideas but some of it is hinted at rather than explicit (for example, there is a reference to a top secret file held by the British government secret services which is classified as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and when the main character mentions that he adds 'but we don't need to worry about that, the stars won't be right for another few decades').

So it seems a lot are making use of the world... and they and their publishers seem to think it is ok to do so. They may, of course, have bought the appropriate rights so that is worth checking into...

Stross' The Laundry series is great! Wonderfully dark and humorous at the same time. I've read all of them so far and hope he does more in the future.

Wow. Just... wow. Here I was going to come in and ask: if I wanted to learn about the Cthulhu Mythos, where would I start? Which stories of Lovecraft and in which order should they be read to get an inkling of what it's about?

Then I see that everyone here is an expert, able to discuss the length and breadth of the subject, and well, now I feel intimidated.

Anyway, for reference, I just bought the eBooks The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack and The Complete Works of HP Lovecraft.

One highly recommended work from Chaosium, if you can find a copy of it, is Encyclopedia Cthulhiana - a truly exhaustive encyclopedia of everything Cthulhu- related and then some.

There was also a recent (last year or the year before) anthology about survival after "the stars come right". I can't remember the title right now, but there was some good stuff in there.

A few years ago Lumley had an excellent story in HPL Magazine called The Green or something like it. Really good addition to the Mythos. My own stories Knock On Wood and Any Minute Now are loosely Mythos-based (and available on Amazon).

For anyone researching the Mythos there are a few stories which are considered to form the heart of the canon - Call Of Cthulhu, Dreams In The Witch House, The Hounds Of Tindalos, The Whisperer In Darkness, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kaddath, The Colour Out Of Space, The Dunwich Horror, Pickman's Model, Herbert West: Re-Animator, and a few others I can't recall off the top of my head right now.

Reading these will give you a real feel for the Mythos.