Authors Like Edgar Allan Poe

E. T. A. Hoffmann

German · The Devil's Elixirs (1815–1816), “The Sandman” (1816), “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (1816)

Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a Prussian lawyer and judge who was also a composer and music critic. In “The Sandman” a student becomes convinced that a sinister lawyer is the childhood monster who steals eyes, and falls in love with a mechanical doll; Freud built his 1919 essay on the uncanny around it. His Nutcracker tale is the source of Tchaikovsky's ballet.

Mary Shelley

British · Frankenstein (1818), The Last Man (1826)

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) began Frankenstein at eighteen, in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, when Lord Byron proposed that each of his guests write a ghost story. It was published anonymously in 1818. The Last Man imagines humanity wiped out by plague at the end of the twenty-first century.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

American · Twice-Told Tales (1837), The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Hawthorne (1804–1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of a judge at the Salem witch trials, and set much of his fiction in Puritan New England. Poe reviewed Twice-Told Tales in 1842 and used the review to set out his theory that a short story should build towards a single effect. The Scarlet Letter follows Hester Prynne, condemned to wear a scarlet A for adultery.

Charles Baudelaire

French · Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Paris Spleen (1869)

Baudelaire (1821–1867) discovered Poe's tales in the late 1840s and spent years translating them; his Histoires extraordinaires (1856) and its successors became the standard Poe of continental Europe. His own collection, Les Fleurs du mal, was prosecuted for offending public morals in 1857, and six poems were banned. The prose poems of Paris Spleen were published two years after his death.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Scottish · A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of the Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was an Edinburgh-trained doctor practising in Southsea when he wrote A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes and his narrator, Dr Watson, follow the pattern Poe set with Dupin and his unnamed friend. In later life Conan Doyle became a leading spiritualist and publicly backed the Cottingley fairy photographs.

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H. P. Lovecraft

American · “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

Lovecraft (1890–1937) lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island, published mainly in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and died poor and little known. His essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) gives Poe a chapter of his own. His fiction and letters contain open racism and antisemitism, and in 2015 the World Fantasy Award dropped the bust of him that had served as its trophy.

Edogawa Ranpo

Japanese · “The Two-Sen Copper Coin” (1923), “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill” (1925), “The Human Chair” (1925)

Edogawa Ranpo was the pen name of Tarō Hirai (1894–1965); said quickly, it sounds like Edgar Allan Poe, whom he admired. “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill” introduced his detective Kogorō Akechi, and “The Human Chair” is the confession of a furniture maker who hides inside an armchair he has built. He founded the club that became the Mystery Writers of Japan, which has awarded the Edogawa Rampo Prize since 1955.

Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine · Ficciones (1944), The Aleph (1949)

Borges (1899–1986) was born in Buenos Aires and became director of Argentina's National Library in 1955, by which time he was going blind. The short stories in Ficciones and The Aleph treat libraries, labyrinths and encyclopedias as whole worlds, and several, such as “Death and the Compass” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”, are detective stories that turn on a logical trap.

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Shirley Jackson

American · “The Lottery” (1948), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson (1916–1965) caused a storm with “The Lottery”, published in The New Yorker in 1948, about a village's annual ritual. The Haunting of Hill House, nominated for the National Book Award, follows four people who stay in a house with a history, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is narrated by Merricat Blackwood, who lives with her sister in the house where the rest of their family was poisoned.

Mariana Enríquez

Argentine · Things We Lost in the Fire (2016), Our Share of Night (2019), A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)

Enríquez was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 and works as a journalist and editor. Her stories, translated into English by Megan McDowell, set horror among Argentina's poor neighbourhoods and suburbs and the memory of the dictatorship's disappeared; The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Our Share of Night, about a father and son bound to a cult, won Spain's Premio Herralde in 2019.