Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890; James Graham Ballard died in 2009. Together these two writers spanned the 20th century. They shared the earth for just seven years between Ballard’s birth in 1930 and Lovecraft’s death in 1937, and those years were spent on separate hemispheres. And their fiction came from different hemispheres of the century: Lovecraft’s could only have been produced before the Second World War, and Ballard’s was inextricably the product of the postwar world.

Both writers are as influential today as they ever were in their lifetime — in Lovecraft’s case, vastly more so. This is due to the nature of their writing. Their business was speculation. They sought original ways to describe the world around them, and in the process often had to create new modes of writing. In its time, speculative writing is often ignored, or shunted into a genre ghetto. Often it is forgotten. But Lovecraft and Ballard both managed to tap into deep veins of human concern, which has kept their work relevant. Perhaps the best evidence of this is that Lovecraft and Ballard have both, like Kafka and Orwell, been turned into useful terms of description — to say “Lovecraftian” and “Ballardian” is to summon at once particular moods, particular storehouses of imagery, particular manners of literature. They claimed their respective territory, they got there first, and they made it their own.

Rub any two writers together and similarities will show. No two writers, however different, are completely different. Here’s a crucial instance: Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject. And it is via this interest that the two intersect in an unexpected way. They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares — and in doing so, they reveal its secret history.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s writing career was a catalogue of chronic failure. He was part of the early 20th-century American pulp scene, writing short stories for magazines such as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. Only one of his stories, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, is long enough to be considered a short novel. He made very little money and lived mostly in poverty. The reputation and popularity he enjoys today would have baffled him in his lifetime.

What saved Lovecraft from being forgotten like scores of other pulp writers was the fascinating mythology he wove through his stories. His monstrous gods and godlike monsters, and the stark, original philosophy that framed them, captured the imagination of other writers in his circle. Peers such as Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith wanted to write Lovecraftian fiction; they kept his writing alive so they could keep the peculiar genre alive.