During the horror unit in our American Literature class we primarily read Edgar Allen Poe or other short stories that usually have origins in the late 1800s, but why don’t we use short stories from the modern master of short horror stories, H.P. Lovecraft, or at least his prodigy Robert Bloch? H.P. Lovecraft is best known for his chilling Cthulhu mythos which are his most popular and well known writings. We may use Edgar Allen Poe’s stories presently in school, which are meant to be about the characters descent into madness, but there is not much horror in the Raven, or the Masque of the Red Death. Within the pages of Lovecraft’s stories there are actual things of horror, eldritch beings, people re-animating the dead, and dark worlds parallel to our own.

Several stories of Lovecraft’s could fit into the unit including Shadow over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, or the Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft’s monsters and old ones, at the time, were incredibly strange and terrifying and almost realistic in a sense. He occasionally had to remind his readers that everything he wrote was not real. Comparing his work to Poe’s, who simply rotated around his inability to overcome the loss of his wife and his characters decent into madness, never truly expressed real horror, unlike Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s stories still bring about a sort of uneasiness to his readers. So, while Poe adds the horror of insanity, H.P. Lovecraft adds the creatures that cause insanity, which if you ask me, fits the horror genre more than Poe. Lovecraft’s stories also reflect his decreasing mental state, fear of the unknown, and xenophobia, which is having a fear of people from other countries. These reflections cause a creative and mildly challenging read for students.