Algernon Blackwood
The supreme master of nature-horror and a direct ancestor of cosmic horror: Blackwood demonstrated that the most profound terror comes from indifference and immensity, not fangs.
Cosmic Horror
Horror of scale and indifference: ancient entities and a universe that neither knows nor cares that humanity exists.
The authors (5)
Robert Bloch
The hinge between Lovecraft's cosmic age and the psychological thriller: Psycho founded the serial-killer genre, and Bloch's insight — that the scariest monster is the neighbour — became modern horror's operating premise.
Ramsey Campbell
The bridge between Lovecraft's tradition and modern British unease, and the field's standard for sustained literary quality: multiple Grand Master and lifetime honours from every body that issues them, and an influence on…
H. P. Lovecraft
The defining figure of twentieth-century horror.
Arthur Machen
A foundational figure of weird fiction whom Lovecraft ranked among the modern masters of horror.
Essential books, oldest first (9)
The Great God Pan
A landmark of weird fiction.
The Willows
Lovecraft named it the single finest weird tale ever written.
The Wendigo
Fixed the wendigo permanently in horror's bestiary, influencing everyone from Lovecraft (who borrowed it for his Ithaqua mythology via Derleth) to Stephen King's Pet Sematary.
The Call of Cthulhu
The defining cosmic horror story and source of one of modern culture's most recognisable monsters, endlessly adapted, gamed and (regrettably) plushified.
At the Mountains of Madness
The peak of Lovecraft's 'materialist' horror, hugely influential on SF-horror hybrids from The Thing (Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' is its sibling) to Alien and Prometheus.
The Shadow over Innsmouth
Source of horror's entire 'fishy seaside town with a secret' tradition, and the story where Lovecraft's hereditary anxieties are most nakedly the engine.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Lovecraft's finest long-form narrative by many estimates; filmed (loosely) as The Haunted Palace and The Resurrected, and a model for necromantic horror since.
It
The summit of King's 1980s — a #1 bestseller that made Pennywise a global archetype, renewed by the record-breaking 2017 film — and the fullest statement of his great subject: what childhood knows…
Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.