We talk about Lovecraft quite a lot around here, and for good reason. He happens to be this writer’s favourite horror author. Still, it’s worth making room for others who were just as good and, in some cases, perhaps even better than our usual poster boy.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) produced most of his work between the 1910s and 1930s. During that period, he wasn’t isolated from the literary world. Quite the opposite. He maintained an enormous network of correspondence with other writers. Many of them were friends who formed what we now know as the “Lovecraft Circle”, helping to expand the Cthulhu Mythos. Others were contemporaries publishing in the same pulp magazines (such as the famous Weird Tales) or authors who directly influenced the transition from Gothic horror to modern cosmic horror.
Here are some of the main horror writers who were contemporary with Lovecraft, listed by date, which was the best way I could think of organising them.
Horror writers contemporary with Lovecraft
M. R. James (1862–1936)
Montague Rhodes James was a brilliant medieval scholar, Provost of King’s College and later of Eton, who made an enormous contribution to British horror literature. He came to be regarded as the definitive master of the modern ghost story, deliberately breaking away from the well-worn clichés of classic Gothic horror, full of crumbling castles and dramatic storms.
James set his stories in ordinary, familiar settings drawn from his own world: university libraries, ancient churches, country inns, and English golf courses. His protagonists are often intellectual gentlemen, antiquarians, or academics who, through sheer scholarly curiosity, uncover some ancient artefact that awakens a malevolent force. Lovecraft himself praised M. R. James’s stories and openly counted himself among his admirers. Clark Ashton Smith felt much the same.
Unlike the ethereal and romantic ghosts of the Victorian era, M. R. James’s hauntings are physical and grotesque creatures, driven by blind malice and focused solely on punishing those who dared disturb their centuries-old rest.
One of M. R. James’s most famous stories can be found in our eBook.
Most of his work consists of short stories collected in his Ghost Stories series:
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
A Thin Ghost and Others
A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories
Arthur Machen (1863–1947)
Arthur Machen, the pen name of Welsh writer Arthur Llewellyn Jones, was one of the brightest minds in weird fiction (at least in my opinion) and one of the major figures in the shift from Victorian Gothic horror to modern horror. Deeply interested in mysticism, paganism, and the Celtic history of his homeland, Machen created narratives that blend these elements, where the veil between everyday life and ancient, terrifying realities is frighteningly thin.
His most famous work, The Great God Pan, caused quite a scandal in Victorian society due to its unsettling blend of psychological horror, decadence, and implied sexuality. Lovecraft held Machen in extremely high regard, and stories such as The White People and The Novel of the Black Seal directly inspired concepts that later appeared in Lovecraft’s own fiction, including surviving pagan cults and degenerate pre-human races lurking in the hidden corners of the Earth.
His best-known works include:
The Great God Pan
The White People
The Three Impostors
The Hill of Dreams
Robert W. Chambers (1865–1945)
Robert William Chambers was a highly successful American author who spent most of his career writing historical and romantic fiction for a mass audience. Even so, he secured his place in horror history through a single book: The King in Yellow, published in 1895.
This collection of Gothic and decadent horror stories revolves around a fictional play of the same name that drives anyone who encounters it towards madness and ruin. Chambers created a fragmented and mysterious mythology centred on fictional locations such as Carcosa and Lake Hali, along with the enigmatic Yellow Sign. Lovecraft read Chambers’s work in the late 1920s and became captivated by its atmosphere of psychological dread and its sense of cosmic inevitability. It’s worth noting that Hastur, the King in Yellow, was not created by Chambers but by Ambrose Bierce in his story Haïta the Shepherd. Lovecraft quickly borrowed elements from The King in Yellow, although the figure itself is mentioned only once in his fiction.
His most iconic work is:
The King in Yellow
Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951)
Algernon Henry Blackwood was one of the most influential horror writers of the early twentieth century and received some of the highest praise imaginable from H. P. Lovecraft in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. Blackwood’s life was nearly as adventurous as his stories. He worked as a farmer in Canada, a gold prospector, and a journalist in New York. I suspect those experiences in the wilderness shaped his literary style quite heavily, leading to what became known as “mystical horror” or “nature horror”.
His stories create a rich psychological atmosphere where fear arises from spiritual awareness and humanity’s isolation when confronted with vast, incomprehensible forces, particularly those found in nature. The basic foundations of what would later become cosmic horror.
His most famous stories are:
The Willows
The Wendigo
William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918)
Whenever I get the chance, I’ll talk about Hodgson here. William Hope Hodgson lived a short and tragic life, dying in combat during the First World War, but he left an unforgettable mark on science fiction and cosmic horror. Having spent years in the merchant navy during his youth, Hodgson channelled his experiences and his strong resentment towards the cruelty and isolation of life at sea into some of the most terrifying nautical horror stories ever written.
Beyond maritime horror, Hodgson also wrote visionary works of dark science fiction such as The House on the Borderland and The Night Land. In these books, he presents extraordinary visions of the end of the world, with Earth surrounded by eternal darkness and colossal monstrosities from other dimensions.
Hodgson was an outstanding writer who introduced ideas that would be copied endlessly by later generations. He deserves far more recognition than he usually receives.
His most famous works are:
The House on the Borderland
Sargasso Sea Stories
The Night Land
Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961)
Alongside Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith formed the great triumvirate of the legendary magazine Weird Tales. Living a largely secluded life in California, Smith was a true Renaissance man: poet, sculptor, and writer of fantastic fiction. Lovecraft admired Smith’s prose almost reverentially. His writing stood out for its highly ornate, poetic style and its unusually rich vocabulary. To be fair, Lovecraft wasn’t exactly modest in that department either.
Smith’s stories leaned heavily towards dark fantasy and planetary horror, often set in lost continents such as Hyperborea, Zothique, and Poseidonis. Some of his stories feature scientists caught in situations that are equally strange and evocative. He also contributed directly to the Lovecraftian universe by creating the grotesque deity Tsathoggua and the ancient Book of Eibon.
Smith’s fiction evokes a sense of cosmic wonder mixed with cruel irony and aesthetic morbidity, where beauty and decay walk hand in hand. Certain conclusions you draw from his stories leave behind an uncomfortable chill.
You can read some of his stories through the links below:
The Supernumerary Corpse – Clark Ashton Smith | Vengeance and the Unknowable
Some of his works include:
The Empire of the Necromancers
The Tale of Satampra Zeiros
Xeethra
Out of Space and Time
Robert E. Howard (1906–1936)
Robert Ervin Howard was one of H. P. Lovecraft’s closest and most prolific correspondents, despite the fact that they never met in person. Born in Texas, Howard is celebrated worldwide as the father of the Sword and Sorcery subgenre, having created immortal characters such as Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane. His contribution to horror, however, is just as significant and often overlooked.
Howard infused his fantasy and adventure stories with oppressive cosmic horror, featuring ancient gods and sinister powers exerting their influence over the world, usually alongside tribal cults and ritualistic practices. And yes, Conan the Cimmerian was published in Weird Tales. Howard clearly enjoyed those more exotic settings.
Later in his career, Howard devoted much of his attention to Western fiction. His best-known contributions to the Mythos are the stories featuring Professor John Kirowan.
Other works include:
The Conan stories
The Solomon Kane stories
August Derleth (1909–1971)
August William Derleth was a versatile writer and one of Lovecraft’s younger correspondents, though his most important contribution to horror literature came after Lovecraft’s death in 1937. Realising that Lovecraft’s work risked disappearing into the yellowing pages of old pulp magazines, Derleth joined forces with Donald Wandrei to establish Arkham House. The publisher’s primary aim was to release Lovecraft’s stories in hardcover editions and preserve his legacy.
As an author, Derleth expanded the Cthulhu Mythos considerably and was responsible for popularising that exact term. His approach, however, remains a topic of debate. Derleth attempted to organise Lovecraft’s cosmic chaos into something closer to a Christian-style mythology, dividing entities into forces of “Good” and “Evil” and linking them to the four classical elements. This differed significantly from Lovecraft’s original nihilistic outlook. Still, if the Mythos remains alive today, a fair amount of credit belongs to Derleth’s dedication and hard work.
Among his most notable works are:
The Sac Prairie Saga
Someone in the Dark
The Mask of Cthulhu
Robert Bloch (1917–1994)
Robert Albert Bloch began his journey into horror fiction as a teenage protégé of H. P. Lovecraft. Fascinated by the stories published in Weird Tales, the young writer started exchanging letters with the master of Providence, an experience that changed his life. Under Lovecraft’s generous guidance, Bloch refined his craft and published his earliest horror stories while still quite young, formally becoming part of the literary circle of the time.
In 1935, Bloch wrote The Shambler from the Stars, in which he created a character explicitly based on Lovecraft, a reclusive mystic from Providence, and proceeded to kill him off in spectacular fashion. Bloch even asked Lovecraft’s permission beforehand, and Lovecraft responded with a letter signed under a pseudonym granting his approval.
Bloch gradually moved away from Lovecraftian imitation and developed a style of his own, writing stories with more grounded plots involving figures such as Jack the Ripper, while still retaining fantastic elements. This evolution reached its peak with his most famous work, the 1959 novel Psycho, which later inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film.
His best-known works are:
Psycho
That Hell-Bound Train
Night of the Ripper
Wrapping Up
There are certainly a few names still missing from this list, such as Frank Belknap Long, Henry S. Whitehead, and R. H. Barlow. Perhaps they’ll make an appearance in a future article. It’s easy to see why Lovecraft became the face of cosmic horror, but looking at his contemporaries reminds us that he wasn’t creating in a vacuum. Many of the ideas we now associate with weird fiction, cosmic dread, occult mysteries, hostile wilderness, forgotten civilisations, and realities lurking just beyond human perception were being explored by a remarkable generation of writers working at roughly the same time.
If you’ve only read Lovecraft, consider this your excuse to branch out a little. Spend an evening with M. R. James, take a trip through Machen’s unsettling visions, wander into Blackwood’s forests, or get lost in Hodgson’s nightmarish seas. You may end up finding a new favourite.
And if not, you’ll probably come away with a longer reading list. Which, around here, is rarely considered a problem.
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