The world has always been implacably bleak the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact.' 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. Author China Miéville notes that 'Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The hallmark of Lovecraft's work is cosmicism, the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale, and uncompromising negativity. Stephen King has said the best of Lovecraft's works are 'uniquely terrible in all of American literature, and survive with all their power intact.'

However, Lovecraft was keen to distinguish his work from existing gothic and supernatural fiction, elevating the horror, in his own words, to a 'cosmic' level. His work was influenced by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Lovecraft refined this style of storytelling into his own mythos that involved a set of supernatural, pre-human, and extraterrestrial elements. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics. His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. Lovecraftian horror, sometimes used interchangeably with ' cosmic horror', is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock.

Subgenre of horror A drawing of Cthulhu, the central cosmic entity in Lovecraft's seminal short story, ' The Call of Cthulhu', first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928.

Fear synonym dredge definition