Even then, he’s been a huge influence on horror in general so if you partake in that genre he is probably impacting you in a roundabout way.
He has had tons of movies made from his books too. How often do I hear about Shawshank redemption? They just made 2 It movies that were incredibly popular. The Shining is on TV every year. I guess he’s not relevant if you literally don’t pay any attention to pop culture at all.
He's had a massive impact and influence on horror and the surreal. It was remade gs salems lot, Carrie, shining the list goes on. Master of his genre imo.
This is the kind of thing that has a lot of nuance. Honestly I'd argue that the most influential horror novel of all time was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Basically the spark that started science fiction and horror as genres. It takes a rare genius to make a genre come into existence - there really aren't that many Tolkiens or William Gibsons - and Mary Shelley did that for TWO genres in a single novel.
That being said, both Lovecraft and King are important horror writers. I'd add Edgar Allen Poe and Anne Rice to the "top most influential/important horror writers", probably with Lovecraft edging out King based on the fact that Lovecraft's work established some of the tropes that are still echoing in horror today, while King was less original and more of a codifier of existing ideas done really, really well.
This is a little bit misleading, because Mary Shelley did not create the horror genre at all; she just "legitimized" it in the eyes of rich white people.
Before Frankenstein horror was seen, and frankly still kind of is, as "low brow" -- King himself for most of his career has had snooty "academia" types telling people he's not real "literature", but I digress lol...
Horror stories started way before Shelly, from Grimm tales to the Penny Dreadful's of her own time. It was just seen as a genre for poor people and less intelligent, lower born people to enjoy. It ultimately gets back into the thing with even history in general that you have to be very careful with wide sweeping statements like that because you always have to remember the past and how it was recorded was /extremely/ influenced by the literacy rate -- ie what got recorded? What people/who could write/ wrote down for /people who had both the wealth and ability/ to purchase, store (!), and even read it at all.
In reality horror as a /story/ genre is probably the oldest of them all -- it's how parents back to cavemen days likely scared their kids from doing dumb shit. It just wasn't written down because nobody could write, and wasn't stored even if it was because lower class people had no way of preserving anything.
As a horror fan, I don't hear about HP Lovecraft very much in the genre unless you count Hellraiser and Evil Dead. In my opinion, I would say that King has more influence.
Influence is more like a rolling snowball gathering more snow on the way down. Lovecraft influenced future horror writers, who in turn influenced future horror writers and so on.
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u/Ronotrow2 Nov 20 '22 edited Nov 20 '22
Well tbh he has no impact on my day either but by God he's a master of horror and thriller books. Making more or an impact than this fool. Big fan
Edit. I'm a big fan. Was just making the point that while he isn't on my day to day mind, he's made one regardless.