I contend that Lovecraft's works are unique because he channeled his anxieties, his fears, his phobias and his prejudices into his writing and created something raw and powerful that later authors who pay homage to him cannot imitate.
So, um, I’ve got Thomas Ligotti right here. I don’t know if you’ve read any of his work? (This is emphatically not any kind of trolling. Most people, even among horror fans, haven’t.). His work does the same, channeling the intense personal horror of finding himself in which every speck of order is only a transitory illusion over primal chaos, in which “there is no one to be, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to know”. His stories are filled with dangerous, revealing mirrors and mannequins, because they are the truth of our own selves that we can seldom bring ourselves to acknowledge except in symbols and nightmares. We are puppets of unseen forces, and we would all be better off if we’d never been born. And he means it.
(This story picks up more weight the more the reader asks just who or what the professor is, who the students are, and just what holiday they celebrate.)
Meanwhile, the morbid man keeps putting his time on earth to no good use, until in the end—amidst mad winds, wan moonlight, and pasty specters—he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.
I find his stories so powerful partly because he is in so many ways a better person than a Lovecraft. He doesn’t have any of Lovecraft’s fears of others’ ethnicity, gender, orientation, or social class; his despair achieves a universal scale because no hatred for any group of us. We are all in the same boat, with the same origin and fate.
And he’s brilliantly inventive, and weaves a great humor through the darkness. Nobody, I think, ever wrote a story in the form of an essay by an imaginary writer about how to write horror, who is consumed in a distinctive way by horror himself. But Ligotti did.