One of my “for fun” books that I have going right now is Houses Under the Sea, a collection of Lovecraft mythos stories by Caitlín Kiernan.1 After reading their story “The Cats of River Street,” which is a really clever story about heroic cats, I found myself thinking about how Lovecraft’s work has had a rich creative afterlife because it all went into the public domain after his death.2 People love to say that superheroes are today’s modern mythology, but the superheroes they mean are protected intellectual property, and I don’t think that’s a merely technical difference. The Old Ones, on the other hand, belong to everybody. Innsmouth belongs to everybody. You can do absolutely anything you want with these things. There’s no Lovecraft style book saying Cthulhu can’t be pictured in a certain way.
But, to pick a similarly influential modern fantasist, you could not do that with Tolkien. You could not write and publish a story that was called “The Cats of Mirkwood,” because the Tolkien est…
