I had a weird idea that I kinda like, but I'm not sure if it'd be worth the time. As it turns out, everything HP Lovecraft wrote is public domain, so there's nothing legally stopping me or anybody else from using his stuff in our own stories. What I'm thinking is, a YA story set in Arkham, Massachusetts, where the main character either moves with his family or is sent there to attend boarding school. The school is Miskatonic High, and a lot of really weird and scary things are going on around town that the residents either can't see or choose to ignore. It would tie in a whole bunch of Lovecraft's stories, sometimes as plot points and sometimes just as Easter eggs, usually in slightly altered ways to make them fit into a high school setting in the 21st century. So I know that the "kid goes to special school" trope has been done to death, and a lot of people don't like modern retellings of classic stories. But I think this could work because 1. Nobody has tried to bring HP Lovecraft to younger readers that I know of, and 2. I can't think of any Lovecraft stories that have been updated for modern times. What do you guys think? Worth a shot or skip it?
I second what Friedrich said. Also one of the best books I've ever read is Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero and it's a Scooby Doo mystery heavily heavily influenced by Lovecraft.
Personally I think it sounds like a potentially fun concept. I also say go for it. Sounds interesting. I'm putting that on my list.
I'm not sure as to why you can't do that. Would it be commercially successful? Who knows? We don't know until we try it.
I'm personally a huge fan of Lovecraft and his works are a major inspiration for my own. However, he had some really racist personal views, even for his time, and it did seep a little into his writings. This doesn't matter for adults so much, since most of us are still mature enough to parse out an author's personal views from their work. But when you run into writing children's lit, you're going to run into more gatekeeping than you normally would. Kind of like how Disney and Warner Brothers have disclaimers on their old work that have controversial scenes, I'd get ahead of the game and prepare to do something similar, before you get cancelled by the woke Twitter mob. Best of luck!
