15 Authors Like Edgar Allan Poe: Your Next Dark Literary Obsession

Your Guide to Poe's Literary Descendants

1. H.P. Lovecraft

If you loved: Poe's descent into madness
You'll devour: Cosmic horror that makes human problems seem adorably small

Poe showed us the terror inside our minds. Lovecraft? He revealed that we're cosmically insignificant specks on a rock hurtling through an indifferent universe filled with incomprehensible entities. Sleep tight!

Start here: The Call of Cthulhu—it's like The Fall of the House of Usher if the house was reality itself and the fall was your entire understanding of existence.

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne

If you loved: The guilt and moral complexity in The Tell-Tale Heart
You'll devour: Puritan-era guilt trips that make modern therapy look appealing

Hawthorne explores sin, shame, and judgment with the same psychological precision as Poe, but adds layers of symbolism that English teachers dream about. His characters don't just commit sins—they marinate in them.

Start here: The Scarlet Letter—adultery has never been this existentially terrifying.

3. Ambrose Bierce

If you loved: Poe's twisted endings and dark humor
You'll devour: Stories where death comes with a side of irony

Bierce is like Poe's cynical older brother who survived the Civil War and came back with zero patience for sentimentality. His stories blend brutal realism with supernatural elements, always with a sting in the tail.

Start here: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—features one of literature's most devastating plot twists. You'll want to immediately reread it.

4. Arthur Conan Doyle

If you loved: The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Poe's detective work
You'll devour: Gothic mysteries solved by history's greatest detective

Doyle inherited Poe's detective DNA and ran with it. While Sherlock Holmes stories lean more toward rational deduction, Doyle never forgot that the human heart is the greatest mystery of all.

Start here: The Hound of the Baskervilles—it's Sherlock Holmes meets gothic horror on the English moors. Atmospheric dread with a side of brilliant deduction.

5. Shirley Jackson

If you loved: The creeping paranoia in Poe's work
You'll devour: Suburban horror where your neighbors are scarier than any ghost

Jackson is Poe for the modern age—finding terror in PTA meetings, family gatherings, and small-town traditions. She proves that horror doesn't need cobwebs and candlelight when you have nosy neighbors and social conventions.

Start here: The Lottery—it's short, brutal, and will make you side-eye your hometown forever.

6. Algernon Blackwood

If you loved: Poe's atmospheric dread
You'll devour: Nature turned nightmare

While Poe trapped his characters in claustrophobic spaces, Blackwood unleashes them into vast, indifferent nature—and somehow makes that even more terrifying. His horror builds slowly, like fog rolling in.

Start here: The Willows—a camping trip goes cosmically wrong. Perfect for when you never want to go outside again.

7. M.R. James

If you loved: The scholarly tone in Poe's work
You'll devour: Academic horror where curiosity kills the professor

James perfected the formula: take one bookish protagonist, add one cursed artifact from a dusty library, shake well, and watch knowledge become weaponized terror. It's horror for people who get nervous in archives.

Start here: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary—proves that the scariest thing in a library isn't overdue fees.

8. Sheridan Le Fanu

If you loved: Poe's psychological subtlety
You'll devour: Victorian horror that whispers rather than screams

Le Fanu understood that what you don't show is often more terrifying than what you do. His stories unfold with nightmare logic, where dread accumulates in the spaces between words.

Start here: Carmilla—vampire literature before Dracula, with more psychological complexity and homoerotic subtext than Victorian society was ready for.

9. Bram Stoker

If you loved: Poe's gothic atmosphere
You'll devour: The vampire novel that defined all vampire novels

Stoker took folklore and transformed it into a psychological epic about desire, invasion, and the thin veneer of civilization. Dracula isn't just a monster—he's every Victorian anxiety given fangs.

Start here: Dracula—yes, it's a commitment, but it's the vampire story for a reason. Atmospheric, epistolary, and genuinely unsettling.

10. Mary Shelley

If you loved: Poe's exploration of obsession
You'll devour: Science fiction's first masterpiece and horror's greatest tragedy

Shelley invented an entire genre at 18 and simultaneously created gothic horror's most sympathetic monster. Her work asks the questions Poe loved: What makes us human? What drives us mad? What happens when ambition exceeds wisdom?

Start here: Frankenstein—forget the movie versions. The book is a philosophical gut-punch wrapped in gothic terror.

11. Charles Baudelaire

If you loved: Poe's dark romanticism
You'll devour: Poetry that finds beauty in decay

Baudelaire didn't just admire Poe—he translated him into French and absorbed his aesthetic completely. His poems explore corruption, urban alienation, and the terrible beauty of moral decay.

Start here: The Flowers of Evil—scandalous, beautiful, and proof that damnation can be lyrical.

12. Robert Louis Stevenson

If you loved: Poe's psychological duality
You'll devour: Adventure stories with philosophical depth

Stevenson combines Poe's interest in the dual nature of humanity with propulsive storytelling. His characters don't just harbor darkness—they battle it with varying degrees of success.

Start here: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—the original "we all have a dark side" story, and still the best.

13. Oscar Wilde

If you loved: Poe's fascination with corruption
You'll devour: Decadence with devastating wit

Wilde takes Poe's moral decay and adds champagne and epigrams. His work exposes society's rot while maintaining an elegant, almost playful tone that makes the horror even more effective.

Start here: The Picture of Dorian Gray—what if your portrait aged while you stayed forever young? Spoiler: nothing good happens.

14. Wilkie Collins

If you loved: The Murders in the Rue Morgue
You'll devour: Victorian mysteries with social commentary

Collins pioneered the sensation novel—mysteries with Poe's psychological insight but with more plot twists than a DNA helix. His stories tackle identity, madness, and conspiracy with addictive readability.

Start here: The Woman in White—identity theft, asylums, and a mystery that unfolds through multiple perspectives. It's the Victorian thriller that influenced everything that came after.

15. Clark Ashton Smith

If you loved: Poe's baroque prose style
You'll devour: Fantasy horror with language so dense it's almost hallucinogenic

Smith takes Poe's ornate writing style and cranks it to eleven, creating stories where every sentence is a dark jewel. His work exists in fantasy realms where horror becomes myth and myth becomes nightmare.

Start here: The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies—for when you want your terror served with a side of lexicographic overload.

Your Dark Reading Journey Awaits

These authors understood what Poe knew instinctively: the most effective horror doesn't just scare you—it reveals something uncomfortable about human nature, about society, about you. They're masters of atmosphere, psychological depth, and that delicious sense of creeping dread that makes you keep reading even when you know you shouldn't.

So dim the lights, brew some tea (or pour something stronger), and prepare to discover your next literary obsession. Just don't blame us when you start hearing footsteps in empty rooms or questioning whether that shadow always looked quite so... sinister.

Which author will you explore first? The choice is yours—but choose wisely. Some doors, once opened, refuse to close.