While recently reading H. P. Lovecraft’s essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, I was struck by the number of authors and their works he cites, the majority of which he offers some degree of laudit. As I have notes for two stories set in the world of Lovecraft fiction, I have been reading his works to immerse myself therein. So when I came around to reading the essay—and seeing all these names—I decided to make a list of them for reference, especially those which garner his highest praise. After all, since his thesis touches on the atmospheric nature of horror, any stories he cites can do me in good stead to read.

Here they are, in the order in which they appear in the text, though I know I moved one or two around, or combined an author’s later appearance with an earlier one. If I have left any out, their number will be significantly small, and as they are dead, no offense is intended or expected.

Introduction
Sabine Baring-Gould: Curious Myths of the Middle Ages
Phlegon: On Wonderful Events; Philinnion and Machates
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Bride of Corinth
Washington Irving: The German Student
Dante Alighieri: (Not specified, probably La Comedia)
Sir Thomas Malory: La Morte d’Arthur
Daniel Defoe: A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal the Next Day after her Death to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury the 8th of September, 1705

 

The Early Gothic Novel
James Macpherson: The Works of Ossian
William Blake: (not specified)
Robert Burns: Tam O’Shanter
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Christabel
James Hogg: Kilmeny
John Keats: Lamia
Gottfried August Bürger: Die Wilde Jäger
Edgar Allan Poe: Lenore
Sir Thomas Moore: The Ring
Prosper Mérimée: The Venus of Ille
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust

Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (“a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird.”)

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (neé Aikin): Sir Bertrand
Clara Reeve: The Old English Baron
Sophia Lee: The Recess
Ann Radcliffe: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; A Sicilian Romance; The Romance of the Forest ; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Italian; and Gaston de Blondeville
Charles Brockden Brown: Edgar Huntly; Ormond; Arthur Mervyn; “Wieland; or, The Transformation”

 

The Apex of Gothic Romance
Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk; The Castle Spectre; Tales of Terror; Tales of Wonder
Jane Austin: Northanger Abbey
Charles Robert Maturin: “Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio”; Melmoth the Wanderer

 

The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction
A few he dislikes (“Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like…”):
Carl Grosse: Die Genius (though it could be the result of Peter Will’s translation as Horrid Tales)
Regina Maria Roche: The Children of the Abbey
Charlotte Dacre (as Rosa Matilda): “Zofloya; or, the Moor”
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Zastrozzi: A Romance; “St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, A Romance”

Back to the good:
William Beckford: The History of the Caliph Vathek; Episodes of Vathek
William Godwin: Caleb Williams; St. Leon
Francis Barrett: The Magus
George W. M. Reynolds: Faust and the Demon; Wagner, the Wehr-wolf
Mary Shelley: “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”
Sir Walter Scott: “The Tapestried Chamber” and “Wandering Willie’s Tale” in Redgauntlet; Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft
Washington Irving: “The Money-Diggers”
Sir Thomas Moore: Alciphron, (which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean)
William Harrison Ainsworth: (not specified)
Frederick Marryat: The Phantom Ship
Charles Dickens: The Signalman
Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “The Haunted and the Haunters: Or the House and the Brain”; Zanoni; A Strange Story
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu: (not specified)
Thomas Preskett Prest: Varney, the Vampyre
Wilkie Collins: (not specified)
Sir H. Rider Haggard: She
Robert Louis Stevenson: “Markheim”; “The Body-Snatcher”; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

 

Spectral Literature on the Continent
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann: (not specified)
Friedrich Heinrich Karl: Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Undine
Wilhelm Meinhold: The Amber Witch
Hanns Heinz Ewers: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; Alraune; “The Spider”
Victor Hugo: Hans, of Iceland
Honoré de Balzac: The Wild Ass’s Skin; Séraphîta; Louis Lamber
Théophile Gautier: “Avatar”; “The Foot of the Mummy”; “Clarimonde”; “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”
Gustave Flaubert: The Temptation of St. Anthony
Guy de Maupassant: “The Horla”; “Who Knows?”; “The Spectre”; “He?”; “The Diary of a Madman”; “The White Wolf”; “On the River”; “Horror”
Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian: “The Man-Wolf”; “The Invisible Eye”; “The Owl’s Ear”; “The Waters of Death”
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: “Torture By Hope”
Gustav Meyrink: The Golem
“Ansky” (anonymous): The Dybbuk

 

Edgar Allan Poe
“MS. Found in a Bottle”
“M. Valdemar”
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
“Metzengerstein”
“The Man of the Crowd”
“The Masque of the Red Death”
“Silence—A Fable”
“Shadow—A Parable”
“Ligeia”
“The Fall of the House of Usher”

 

The Weird Tradition in America
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret; The Marble Faun; Septimius Felton; “The Ancestral Footstep” (unwritten, notes only)
Fitz-James O’Brien: “What Was It?”; “Diamond Lens”
Ambrose Bierce: “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (“called by Frederic Taber Cooper the most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race”); “The Damned Thing”; “The Suitable Surroundings”; “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot”; “The Spook House”
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Elsie Venner
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
F. Marion Crawford: “For the Blood Is the Life”; “The Dead Smile”; “The Upper Berth” (“…Crawford’s weird masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature.”); all collected in Wandering Ghosts
Robert W. Chambers: The King in Yellow (series); The Maker of Moons; In Search of the Unknown
Mary E. Wilkins: “The Shadows on the Wall”, appearing in The Wind in the Rose-Bush
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Wall Paper”
Ralph Adams Cram: “The Dead Valley”
Irvin S. Cobb: “Fishhead”
Leonard Cline: The Dark Chamber
Herbert S. Gorman: The Place Called Dagon
Leland Hall: Sinister House
Edward Lucas White: “The Song of the Sirens”; “Lukundoo”; “The Snout”
Clark Ashton Smith: The Hashish-Eater; The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (collection)

 

The Weird Tradition in the British Isles
Rudyard Kipling: “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; “‘The Finest Story in the World’”; “The Recrudescence of Imray”; “The Mark of the Beast”
Lafcadio Hearn: Fantastics; Kwaidan; Temptation of St. Anthony
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Matthew Phipps Shiel: “Xélucha”; “The House of Sounds”; The Purple Cloud
Bram Stoker: The Lair of the White Worm (“..utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile.”); The Jewel of Seven Stars; Dracula
Richard Marsh: The Beetle
“Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward): Brood of the Witch-Queen
Gerald Biss: The Door of the Unreal
Francis Brett Young: Cold Harbour
John Buchan: Witch Wood; “The Green Wildebeest”; “The Wind in the Portico”; “Skule Skerry”
Clemence Housman: “The Were-wolf”
Arthur Ransome: (not specified)
H. B. Drake: The Shadowy Thing
George Macdonald: Lilith
Walter de la Mare: The Return; “Seaton’s Aunt” (“in which there lowers a noxious background of malignant vampirism”); “The Tree”; “Out of the Deep” (“wherein we are given leave to imagine what thing answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he pulled a long-feared bell-cord in the attic chamber of his dread-haunted boyhood…”); “A Recluse”; “Mr. Kempe”; “All-Hallows”
E. F. Benson: “The Man Who Went Too Far”; “Negotium Perambulans” (in Visible and Invisible); “The Horror-Horn”; “The Face”
H. R. Wakefield: “The Red Lodge”; “‘He Cometh and He Passeth By’”; “‘And He Shall Sing . . .’”; “The Cairn”; “‘Look Up There!’”; “Blind Man’s Buff”; “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” – featured in the collections They Return at Evening and Others Who Return
H.G. Wells: “The Ghost of Fear”; Thirty Strange Stories
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’”; “Lot No. 249”
Hugh Walpole: “Mrs. Lunt”
John Metcalfe: “The Bad Lands” in the collection The Smoking Leg
E. M. Forster: The Celestial Omnibus (a collection: “Of these only one, dealing with a glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true element of cosmic horror.”)
Mrs. H. D. Everett: (not specified)
L. P. Hartley: “A Visitor from Down Under”
May Sinclair: Uncanny Stories
William Hope Hodgson: The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”; The House on the Borderland; The Ghost Pirates; The Night Land; Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder
Robert Browning: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
(Irish traditional): “Teig O’Kane”
William Butler Yeats: (not specified)

 

Modern Masters
Arthur Machen: Chronicle of Clemendy; The Hill of Dreams; “The Great God Pan”; “The White People”; The Three Impostors (in this work, “…whose merit as a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty (Robert Louis) Stevenson manner, occur certain tales which perhaps represent the high-water mark of Machen’s skill as a terror-weaver.”); “The Novel of the Black Seal”; “Novel of the White Powder”; “The Red Hand”; “The Shining Pyramid”; The Terror; The Great Return; “The Bowmen”

Algernon Blackwood: “The Willows”; “The Wendigo”; “An Episode in a Lodging House”; “The Listener”; Incredible Adventures; John Silence—Physician Extraordinary; Jimbo; The Centaur

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany: “Argimēnēs”; “Bethmoora”; “Poltarnees”; “Camorak”; “Illuriel”; “Sardathrion”; The Book of Wonder; The Gods of the Mountain; A Night at an Inn; The Laughter of the Gods; The Queen’s Enemies

Montague Rhodes James: A Warning to the Curious (collections); “Count Magnus”; “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”; “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”; “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’”; “An Episode of Cathedral History”