>>7708579I am.
Lovecraft was inspired heavily by Hodgson and seems to have been one of his biggest fans.
I’d put it like this. Hodgson wrote short stories based on so much life experience they seem real, where you aren‘t sure if the characters slipped into an alien realm, the land of the dead and/or evil fairies, or just some super inhospitable tundra no man has ever returned from and you aren’t sure if its monsters, ghosts, or tricks of weary and traumatized minds playing off each other like mass hysteria. His stories are scary because they put you straight into the shoes of the character, but without that first person feel they would be pretty mundane. Like a VR experience compared to a regular one. He doesn’t have monsters so much as unsettling places and the local eco system in them that feel very much like something that really exists.
Lovecraft was writing from a super sheltered place of no experience, kind of ripping off the stories both real and fictional of others because he had no real life source to draw on but mixing in that complete unawareness of the world so you experience the fear of unknown itself. The stories are far shorter, and feel like third or fourth hand accounts which lends them a more dry form of believability that skips straight to the surreal fears. He has actual monsters and thanks to his fans a concrete continuity, even if the categorization really kills the horror.
Finally, Stephen King. Taking a short story and turning it into a fucking bible. Leaves very little to the imagination as every fucking bit character gets at least paragraphs of story, and every monster gets at least one chapter from their perspective with their thoughts. The fear comes from just how quickly shit can go poorly, and how people can go so wrong for basically no reason. The monsters being people, and all people being monsters means that anyone other than a designated protagonist can snap and go fucking Eldritch at any time.
