The Cthulhu Mythos is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of Anglo-American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The term was coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent and protégé of Lovecraft, to identify the settings, tropes, and lore that were employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The name "Cthulhu" derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928.
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures".
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Horror is a genre of speculative fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten, or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length ... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.
Robert Albert Bloch was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, psychological horror and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television. He also wrote a relatively small amount of science fiction. His writing career lasted 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film. He began his professional writing career immediately after graduation from high school, aged 17. Best known as the writer of Psycho (1959), the basis for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock, Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over 30 novels. He was a protégé of H. P. Lovecraft, who was the first to seriously encourage his talent. However, while he started emulating Lovecraft and his brand of cosmic horror, he later specialized in crime and horror stories working with a more psychological approach.
Arthur Machen was the pen-name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, a Welsh author and mystic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language." He is also well known for "The Bowmen", a short story that was widely read as fact, creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The British first edition was published by Chatto & Windus in 1895.
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.
Frank Belknap Long Jr. was an American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos alongside his friend, H. P. Lovecraft. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).
Supernatural fiction or supernaturalist fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction that exploits or is centered on supernatural themes, often contradicting naturalist assumptions of the real world.
Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror, is a subgenre of horror, fantasy fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics.
The Great God Pan is an 1894 horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write The Great God Pan by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890. Machen later extended The Great God Pan and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a woman named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan.
The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions.
"The Picture in the House" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft. It was written on December 12, 1920, and first published in the July issue of The National Amateur—which was published in the summer of 1921. It was reprinted in Weird Tales in 1923 and again in 1937.
The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations is an episodic horror novel by Welsh writer Arthur Machen, first published in 1895 in The Bodley Head's Keynotes Series. It was revived in paperback by Ballantine Books as the forty-eighth volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in June 1972.
"The White People" is a horror short story by Welsh author Arthur Machen. Written in the late 1890s, it was first published in 1904 in Horlick's Magazine, edited by Machen's friend A. E. Waite, then reprinted in Machen's collection The House of Souls (1906).
Henry St. Clair Whitehead was an American Episcopal minister and author of horror, some non fiction and fantasy fiction.
The Dark Chamber is a 1927 horror novel by American writer Leonard Cline.
"Lot No. 249" is a Gothic horror short story by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in Harper's Magazine in 1892. The story tells of a University of Oxford athlete named Abercrombie Smith who notices a strange series of events surrounding Edward Bellingham, an Egyptology student who owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, including a mummy. After seeing his mummy disappear and reappear, and two instances of Bellingham's enemies being attacked, Smith concludes that Bellingham is re-animating his mummy.
