Origin
Lovecraft refined this style of story-telling into his own mythos that involved a set of supernatural, pre-human, and extraterrestrial elements. His work was inspired by and similar to previous authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Algernon Blackwood.
The hallmark of Lovecraft's work is cosmicism: the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality which is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person. Lovecraft's work is also steeped in the insular feel of rural New England, and much of the genre continues to maintain this sense that "that which man was not meant to know" might be closer to the surface of ordinary life outside of the crowded cities of modern civilization. However, Lovecraftian horror is by no means restricted to the countryside; 'The Horror at Red Hook', for instance, is set in a crowded ethnic ghetto.
Read more about this topic: Lovecraftian Horror
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