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[Jiharo]

I'd like to give a mention to Ray Bradbury. While he is not a predominantly a horror writer, many of his stories are really creepy. "October's game", for example, or some of Martian Chronicles stories (one of those is big humorous homage to Poe, but still manages to be unsettling.)

[Yoink]

@Nenjin: I worded that poorly, I was more commenting on how those three were pretty much the only ones who'd been discussed.

I'll have to check out some of the stuff mentioned so far.

[nenjin]

No no, I think it's a fair observation. King and Poe are good, but Lovecraft is stimulating in a way they're not. (Like, tentacularly stimulating.)

[SalmonGod]

Unbelievably relevant to this thread

Amazing coincidence that it came out the day before this thread did

[nenjin]

As much as I try not to like Epic Rap Battles, that was pretty good.

[SalmonGod]

I have always liked Edgar Allan Poe.
I've always wanted to read Lovecraft and Stephen King, but sadly my parents don't let me read much of these kinds of stories.

You have the internet.

[nenjin]

In terms of perversion and gore, Stephen King is like, 10x more explicit than Lovecraft. Lovecraft is a right proper gentleman in his writing, and most of his horror is psychological. Stephen King doesn't generally go in for a ton of gore, but he's not shy about sexual references and themes in some of his stories. I'm honestly surprised that anyone who hasn't read Lovecraft would object to him, unless they're religious fundamentalists or something.

[Xantalos]

I have always liked Edgar Allan Poe.
I've always wanted to read Lovecraft and Stephen King, but sadly my parents don't let me read much of these kinds of stories.

You have the internet.

Indeed.
http://www.hplovecraft.com

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm afraid I'm also on the Lovecraft bandwagon. I'll re-iterate the honorable mention of Junji Ito as well. I like King, but I've never really thought of him as scary outside of It.

[DeKaFu]

I found King's short stories a lot better at being scary than his novels, for reasons people have already mentioned. The fact I read a lot of them when I was younger might also be influencing my reaction there.

I've always found the sort of horror that takes a situation that is both horrible and impossible to the point of absurdity, but happening anyway, to be rather effective on me. The ones that seem almost silly on the surface to the point where you're tempted to just dismiss them, except with the perspective that you can't dismiss them because they're right there and the universe has apparently just broken down enough to let it happen.

There was some Stephen King short story like that about a guy who finds a living human finger sticking out of his bathroom drain and tapping around in circles, and it gets longer every day until there's dozens of knuckles showing. I read it in my early teens and as silly a premise as it is, I had trouble taking showers for weeks afterwards.

[alway]

As for me, Lovecraft. Though tbh, I don't really see it as horror. Rather, I see it as sci-fi which was somewhat ahead of its time. A great example of this from the end of Whisperer in the Darkness:

Spoiler: plot spoilers (click to show/hide)

In the end, he is told about the devices they use to allow for space travel involving beings not normally suited for space travel. These devices essentially remove the being's brain, and attach it to sensory devices allowing a suitable existence, even in places where they would otherwise have no comprehension of what was occurring. This story was created in 1931.

What it's talking about is essentially cybernetic enhancement for the purpose of space travel/living in space. In terms of sci-fi, that's a pretty new idea. It was only a few years prior that the inspiration for this bit (brain in a vat) was actually first posited as a possibility. This was in an era when the word 'cyborg' didn't yet exist; when even the word 'robot' was only a decade old. The first use of the word "cyborg?" It came in 1960, with the publication of the influential Clynes and Kline paper. What was that paper about? Cybernetic enhancement for the purpose of space travel. Even some of the themes of the paper and those addressed by the story are similar. Dude was, in many ways, ahead of his time. A bit ironic, given his propensity towards a rather archaic setting and diction.

I have always liked Edgar Allan Poe.
I've always wanted to read Lovecraft and Stephen King, but sadly my parents don't let me read much of these kinds of stories.

You have the internet.

Indeed.
http://www.hplovecraft.com

Yep. Always check Project Gutenberg as well.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600031h.html <-- collected works of HP Lovecraft

[ChairmanPoo]

Re:  Stephen King as an horror writer.


Imo his most genuinelly scary novel is Pet Semetary. Very Lovecraftian, that particular one

[Drakale]

I found King's Tommyknockers to be pretty scary, but I was also much younger at the time I read it. Not sure why it was so disturbing, but it left quite an impression on me.