Stephen King vs H.P. Lovecraft (Misery and a The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft)

Reading a Stephen King story has always been a weird experience for me. People often hail him as one of the greatest horror writers of all time, but his novels have never really made me disturbed, unnerved, or horrified. It's hard to explain, but there's something about King's voice and style that has always made it hard for me to be scared by his writing. Perhaps the biggest problem I have with King is how explicit and to the point his stories are. I find it odd that people often say that horror novels scare them more then horror movies or games because it allows them to project their own fears into the story and imagine what is most terrifying to them, but then cite King as a master of horror.

King's writing often leaves very little to the imagination or is simply not interesting enough to make you want to try to visualize what is happening in his book. 

In Misery, Annie Wilkes is scary because she preforms unpredictable  acts of violence that put Paul in danger. The reason that this doesn't particularly scare me is because there are only ever two real possible outcomes for Paul; he can either somehow escape Annie and live or stay with her and continue to write Misery Chastain novels until Annie inevitably snaps and kills him. This lack of real mystery or ambiguity is why novels like Misery don't scare me as much as short stories by my personal favorite horror author, H.P. Lovecraft.
At this point, click on this link to listen to a song that perfectly captures the way that reading Lovecraft stories makes me feel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaM9YRUsDXs

Lovecraft's stories have everything that I love about horror and make me feel uncomfortable and insignificant. While King's stories are more straightforward, Lovecraft is about the unknown, and how fragile human sanity is. Despite being far older than King novels, many of Lovecraft's stories like The Call of Cthulhu have themes that are more relevant to modern society like the idea of humans discovering something that they shouldn't.

Lovecraft deals with the unknown as well as the unknowable; malevolent forces so powerful that simply trying to comprehend then would make a person go insane. This idea of the unknowable is what really sticks out to me and terrifies me. While reading his stories, I almost felt like I was being watched. Lovecraft's stories have this ethereal, omnipotent tone to them that make you feel powerless and tiny. Many people love King because his horror is down to Earth and human, but Lovecraft's stories make you realize how petty and insignificant human issues are when compared, to the vast, ever expanding, and mysterious universe which surely has other worlds or creatures in it which would be impossible for a human to comprehend.

I know that at the end of the day, different people find different things scary, but my point in writing this was to try to explain why I think Stephen King is overrated by explaining the kind of horror that impacts me the most. For me, King's style of horror will never impact me the way that Lovecraft's does.
Misery's Page Count: 352
H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction Page Count(I kind of skipped around and didn't read every story, but it was somewhere around...): 700
My Total Page Count: 1735