Nobody else wrote like this because nobody else went and got the words first. Smith read the dictionary. The entire dictionary, cover to cover, twice, and the Britannica after it, out in a cabin near Auburn with no electricity and no plumbing whatsoever, on the sound principle that a man who intends to describe the indescribable had better go in properly armed.
Then look what he did with the arsenal. Two thieves saunter into abandoned Commoriom to rob the temple of Tsathoggua — the sleepy toad-god, furred and squat and thoroughly disinclined to rise for visitors — and find no treasure at all, only a patient black viscidity dwelling in the altar basin, which takes one of them entire and a good portion of the other. On Mars, down in the vaults of Yoh-Vombis, the archaeologists descend with lanterns and something flat and leathery lets go of the ceiling, lands on a scalp, and makes itself comfortable, and stays. And in Averoigne every graveyard for forty miles empties itself in a single night, the dead walking out unattended and in remarkably good order, all of them trooping toward one ruined castle where the sorcerer Nathaire is boiling and stitching them into a single colossus he fully intends to wear.
Why? Because Nathaire was a very small man and had been laughed at for the whole of his life. So he built a big one. Out of everybody.
And Smith wrote nearly all of it inside a handful of hard years, for the pulps, at rates the magazines paid late when they paid at all, to keep his parents fed and doctored. When they were gone he put the words down and went back to carving little squat gods out of soft local rock, by hand, in a shed, for nobody at all.
