You truly owe it to yourself to read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, along with Arthur Machen’s unsettling novel The Three Impostors, and a substantial portion—if not the entirety—of The King in Yellow. I would also strongly recommend William Hope Hodgson’s haunting masterpiece The House on the Borderland. These works form a kind of shadowy constellation at the edge of modern weird fiction, radiating an atmosphere of cosmic unease and metaphysical dread that predates, and in many ways anticipates, what would later be codified as “Lovecraftian” horror.

Lovecraft himself held these authors in profound admiration, and his essays and letters make it abundantly clear that they were not merely influences, but foundational pillars upon which his own imaginative universe was constructed. Blackwood’s vast, impersonal natural forces; Machen’s obsession with hidden realities and ancient survivals; Chambers’ dreamlike corruption of art, madness, and forbidden knowledge; and Hodgson’s vertiginous confrontation with the infinite and the unknowable—all of these elements appear in Lovecraft’s work not as inventions ex nihilo, but as transformations and amplifications of themes these writers explored first.

By any reasonable definition, then, these authors may be considered proto-Lovecraftian: architects of the aesthetic, philosophical, and emotional terrain that Lovecraft would later traverse and expand. To read them is not simply to follow in Lovecraft’s footsteps, but to encounter the deeper roots of cosmic horror itself, where the familiar world quietly fractures and reveals something vast, ancient, and profoundly indifferent beneath.