cobalt79 Wrote:The basic stock of horror stories. HP Lovecraft. The Pit and the Pendulum comes to mind first for me. There are many, many others.
FWIW, "Pit and the Pendulum" is a Poe story, not a Lovecraft.
Jamo, Lovecraft didn't really "create" the Otherness so much as write stories about incomprehensible horrors just beyond the boundaries of our dimension. He's hugely influential amongst horror writers - once you start reading Lovecraft, you'll see a huge number of homages everywhere, including King, who makes Lovecraft references frequently.
If you want a sampling, you can read the story "The Call of Cthulhu" online - it's one of his most famous, and very typical of his work. Read it at Dagonbytes dot com (I would post the link, but I'm too new to do so).