What Horror series is the equal to Lord of the Rings?

[Dervish]

Like Jorick said, pretty much all of Lovecraft's work is short stories that aren't related in any way. A lot of it is stuff he was commissioned to write or that he submitted to magazines.

Tolkein, on the other hand, spent a massive chunk of his life developing the lore, languages, world building and an obscenely huge history for Middle Earth just to to set up the Lord of the Rings. It's decades of work and development compared to a few months per story.

 

[Minerva]

Horror. Man. Lovecraf started a whole horror mythos, Edgar allan Poe is considered the Grand daddy of gothic horror. Stephen King is.. well one of the Kings of Modern horror. Those three are a good start.

But Lovecraft didn't create the whole Mythos.

Hastur, The Yellow Sign,The King in Yellow, and Carcosa were from a book called the King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. Which in turn was inspired by Bearce's work. (Carcosa is from a story by Bearce.)

 

[Hellis]

He started. I never said he created everything. He was also in constant contact with some of the greatest fiction writers of his time. Its why his mythos was continued and worked upon by others. The Yellow King was tied to the mythos later, I am well aware that they are not by him. I never did mention any specifics for a reason.

@Dervish

To be fair. Lovecraft did have structure to what he wrote. And he had notes up the fucking wazoo regarding his cosmology. He was as I mentioned earlier in the post, in corrospondance with alot of fiction writers such as the author of the Conan Books. To dismiss his works and its influence is kinda missleading.

 

[Minerva]

He started. I never said he created everything. He was also in constant contact with some of the greatest fiction writers of his time. Its why his mythos was continued and worked upon by others. The Yellow King was tied to the mythos later, I am well aware that they are not by him. I never did mention any specifics for a reason.

@Dervish

To be fair. Lovecraft did have structure to what he wrote. And he had notes up the fucking wazoo regarding his cosmology. He was as I mentioned earlier in the post, in corrospondance with alot of fiction writers such as the author of the Conan Books. To dismiss his works and its influence is kinda missleading.

Ah! Ok. and Hastur was a part of the Mythos before his story was (Carcosa, HAstur, and the Yellow Sign were mentioned in The Mountains of Madness.)

 

[Windsong]

I found this on my phones notes. It's relevant I guess. Reminder: I did not write this.

[spoili]
Lovecraft didn't have a deep vocabulary, he just kept using the same "deep" words over and over again without any originality. Cyclopean. Eldritch. Singularly. There's a lot more to writing then vocabulary.

If you like Lovecraft and his ideas, try the writers that Lovecraft liked and ripped his ideas off of.

If you like indescribable horrors from beyond time, space, and human understanding, read Algernon Blackwood.

If you like slimy undersea horrors like Chtulhu, Dagon, or the Innsmouth fish people, read William Hope Hodgson.

If you like strange books driving men mad, read Robert Chambers.

If you like strange fantasy realms just behind the veil, with weird names and strange creatures, read Clark Ashton Smith.

If you like odd decayed ruins, run down hovels, weird mythological figures causing mischief in forgotten rural backwards, try Dunsany.

There's a whole world out there filled with fantastic weird fiction, and HPL's just babby's first author. He's for casuals, in the worst sort of way.
[/spoili]

 

[Dervish]

I found this on my phones notes. It's relevant I guess. Reminder: I did not write this.

[spoili]
Lovecraft didn't have a deep vocabulary, he just kept using the same "deep" words over and over again without any originality. Cyclopean. Eldritch. Singularly. There's a lot more to writing then vocabulary.

If you like Lovecraft and his ideas, try the writers that Lovecraft liked and ripped his ideas off of.

If you like indescribable horrors from beyond time, space, and human understanding, read Algernon Blackwood.

If you like slimy undersea horrors like Chtulhu, Dagon, or the Innsmouth fish people, read William Hope Hodgson.

If you like strange books driving men mad, read Robert Chambers.

If you like strange fantasy realms just behind the veil, with weird names and strange creatures, read Clark Ashton Smith.

If you like odd decayed ruins, run down hovels, weird mythological figures causing mischief in forgotten rural backwards, try Dunsany.

There's a whole world out there filled with fantastic weird fiction, and HPL's just babby's first author. He's for casuals, in the worst sort of way.
[/spoili]

Looks like I just added a lot to my reading list.

 

[Dervish]

He started. I never said he created everything. He was also in constant contact with some of the greatest fiction writers of his time. Its why his mythos was continued and worked upon by others. The Yellow King was tied to the mythos later, I am well aware that they are not by him. I never did mention any specifics for a reason.

@Dervish

To be fair. Lovecraft did have structure to what he wrote. And he had notes up the fucking wazoo regarding his cosmology. He was as I mentioned earlier in the post, in corrospondance with alot of fiction writers such as the author of the Conan Books. To dismiss his works and its influence is kinda missleading.

I'm actually a big Lovecraft fan, and I'm currently reading his entire works in one bigass, leather bound book.

 

[dreamshell]

Bierce and Chambers both predate Lovecraft's Mythos, their relevant works coming out in the 1890s when Lovecraft was a boy, but he included references to them later that were then shared by other Mythos writers. It's perhaps worth speculating how remembered they would be today without his incorporation of some of their creations. But a lot of earlier authors influenced HPL and found their way into his work. A couple others not yet mentioned include Arthur Machen ("The White People," "The Great God Pan," "The Novel of the Black Seal," etc.) and, perhaps most significantly, Poe. HPL discusses many of his influences and what he considered to be noteworthy contemporaries in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."

While he certainly has his favorite go-to words, wrote in an overall antiquated style and especially got a little overwrought in his earlier work, I think it's a bit lazy to say he didn't use any "deep" vocabulary (whatever that means). Any number of fans might attest to any number of stirring passages he wrote throughout his lifetime. But this is a matter of taste. However, that he focused on nothing but vocabulary is patently false. As the aforementioned essay and countless of his letters show, Lovecraft put a loooot of thought into the mechanics of the horror story. While we may see it as a detriment that his characters or certain plot circumstances are flat or contrived, it's only fair to say that these weren't things he was concerned with focusing on. Rather, he was all about cultivating an atmosphere of cosmic horror and "the weird."

But yeah, I definitely agree the authors and stories that inspired him should get more attention. Most of it's over a hundred years old by this point and readily available online on sites like WikiSource, Gutenberg, Archive.com, etc.

 

[Space Cowboy]

The sci-fi cinematic equivalent to Lord of the Rings would be Star Wars.

As far as literature is concerned, Dune from Herbert and Asimov's Foundation series did to sci-fi what Tolkien's Lord of the Rings did to fantasy.

Can't tell you horror, but I know the primogeniture to the genre would be Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. It's actually a damn good book. I guess some people might point to Stephen King for modern horror's sorceror-king.


EDIT: I'm an idiot. Lovecraft for horror!