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6 Horror Fiction in the 20th Century Dunsany, with his affection for forgotten or invented gods, felt restricted by this tradition and fl outed it in his work. Dunsany was not the fi rst English fantasy author to create a secondary world William Morris, in The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), had fully described one. But Dunsany added to his secondary worlds intricate, fantastic mythologies and folklores that had nothing to do with any human mythology. This mythos creation had an incalculable effect on Lovecraft as well as a not-insignifi cant number of fan- tasy and horror writers. Blackwood’s revolt was against civilization itself. In Blackwood’s stories, nature itself is ambiguous, vastly powerful, and populated with inimical elementals “these stories often combine a sense of threat and a sense of nostalgia where anxiety and consolation are often paradoxically interwo- ven in a fashion that was unique to Blackwood.” 12 His horror stories were visionary in the best way, and his exploration of humanity’s place in the cosmos, with the resulting proto-cosmic horror, was infl uential on numer- ous other writers, including Lovecraft. Blackwood inspired other writers through sheer excellence, but also infl uenced them in other ways. Black- wood communicated his belief in mysticism through his fi ction, described a variety of altered psychological states, and treated occult matters with a sobriety and seriousness quite at odds with most previous authors’ treat- ments. Blackwood’s contemporaries and successors took all these from him, as they did the occult detective subgenre, which, while not Black- wood’s invention, 13 was still popularized and given momentum by his “John Silence” stories (1908–1914). Breaks with Tradition Machen, Dunsany, James, and Blackwood did not form individual “schools” of like-minded writers and devotees. Nothing so organized existed, nor was the horror genre large enough for there to be rival schools of writers. None- theless, Machen et al. exerted a sizable infl uence on those writers who fol- lowed them so that it can be said with some accuracy that each writer of the quartet established or at least popularized various strains or modes or approaches to horror fi ction, modes and approaches that other writers found useful to partake of and which largely came to dominate the horror fi ction produced in the wake of Machen et al. The prevalence of these strains of horror fi ction during the years before World War I created what was, in effect, a group of “modern” horror writ- ers, separate and distinct from the “traditionalists,” those writers who were holdovers from the previous century or who simply wrote like it or whose stories had the style and/or concerns of the older, less fashionable horror writers. The “modern” writers were not all a part of the Machen/Dunsany/ James/Blackwood lines some were unique, or were infl uenced by Machen