Spooks

>>9275268
Horror is a weird genre, in that it isnt as crammed full of trash as sci fi and fantasy, but still lacks the definitive works of the genre such as Lem, Wolfe, Tolkein, Dick, Herbert.

The biggest names are the most bottom tier shit, and the stuff that is closest to literary fiction is either from the 20s or very very obscure and niche like ligotti and dan simmons early on.

>>9275291
I agree. I've tried reading big names of Horror like King, Lovecraft, Poe, Barker, and I have no idea why the fuck they're given such praise and that goes with all books in general (Which is a little off topic) but I don't understand why so many popular books end up so.

I don't typically like horror but Blackwood isn't really strictly horror. Like his contemporaries (Machen etc.) the important thing is not what's said but what's not said. The stories aren't incredibly overt, sometimes they never explicitly reveal whether the core "horror" feature was actually real at all or just a figment of the character's imagination, and in a sense this makes "weird" fiction that much weirder and more enjoyable.

>>9275291
Wolfe has written some horror. But its Kafka sort of horror, or is about a sort of dread not related to monsters, but just how hallow human existence is. "Redbeard" is a good example, short but very haunting.

>>9275268
you should definitely read The Wendigo and The Man Whom the Trees Loved. they're both in the collection that Penguin released which has some other solid (but not as good) stories. Penguin also released collections by M.R. James and Arthur Machen that are worth reading.