I myself was caught by the fact that it gets rather hard to tell who was who towards the end. I remember some debate over who exactly was ressurected out of one of those bottles.
We’ve had several Lovecraft-related CS threads before. Check out the following:
No one has yet mentioned (unless I missed it) that many (if not all) of his works are online at this site.
Then, of course, for more info, there is always http://www.hplovecraft.com/
I think Lovecraft is the best of all horror writers. Something about the florid prose makes me feel that I hear eldritch keenings from unnamed cyclopean vaults. A few hours reading Lovecraft can still really creep me out.
I don’t think much of the dream stuff; it just goes on and on. Some people I’ve known like it the best, though.
As has been said earlier, movie adaptations (bastardizations is more like it) universally suck. They can’t even come close to the tone Lovecraft sets; in fact, they don’t even seem to try. That’s probably a bit unfair: I think Dagon, for example, was an honest attempt (though why an adaptation of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is called “Dagon,” I don’t know). But the movie is grungy and gross, while “Shadow” is pretty unsettling.
“Dreams in the Witch House,” BTW, is a great story that hasn’t been mentioned yet. The horror is just on the other side of the plaster.
Thanks Dijon!
I used to have a similar site bookmarked but it disappeared. Before the moderators or anybody else bring it up, the vast majority of Lovecraft’s work has passed into the public domain (the vanished site had a page adressing this in detail. In the case of some works, it’s unclear if anybody ever inherited the copyright afte Lovecraft died)
Hmm, on closer inspection, I can get the story links to work. And the links go to Gizmology, the same vanished site I spoke of.
But there seems to be no Lovecraft section on the Gizmology website anymore. All Lovecraft links go to a page that says that the page is no longer there, that I cannot get there from here (wherever “here” is).
WRS
One of my favorite Lovecrafts is The Outsider. It’s been said (and not just be me!), that it Lovecraft had signed Poe’s name to this story, that people would have accepted it as a lost masterpiece.
Most of the good Lovecraft recommendations have already been taken, so I will instead direct attention to some of these other writers:
http://www.creative.net/~alang/lit/horror/horror.sht
Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” is on this site (also recommended, Blackwood’s “Wendigo,” which is not on the site), and Machen’s “Great God Pan.”
True, I should have given credit where credit was due. But I still think it was rather impudent of him to publish “Lurker at the Threshold” as some sort of collaboration, when it was really a Derleth novel that he had waved some of Lovecraft’s short stories near, hoping no one would notice.
I found this site when spelunking about:
Which is one of many sites which can be searched using cthuugle 
Now that’s funny!
Allow me to be the dissenting opinion, here. To me, Lovecraft has always seemed sort of empty. I mean, there’s something to be said for leaving some things to the readers’ imaginations. But when you leave absolutely everything to the imagination, what’s the point of having the author or the book any more? A typical scene in Lovecraft goes something like this: “It approached me from around the corner, and my sanity nearly fled me at the merest glimpse of its eldritch form. What it looked like I cannot say; there are no words for such horrors. I tried to run, but some primal fear rooted me to the spot. I felt my consciousness fleeing me. When I awoke, no trace of that unspeakable abomination remained”. I mean, from all the more description Lovecraft ever gives, he could be talking about fluffy pink teddy bears.
I beg to differ. Although the accusation rings true for a number of his short stories, most of his best, such as “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, and his dream-style works, are rich in visual detail while leaving tantalizing details vague.
He knew that whatever he could write could not posssibly compare to what the reader could conjure up on there own. I find that he repeatedly tried to decipher what minimum he could provide while still giving the imagination enough to go on. I applaud his successes in this endeavor, rather than denigrate his failures. Hence my recommendation of the well-selected “Best of…” collection.
Yeah I’m with scotandrsn on that one. In his best stories, he colors in the monstrosities just fine.
“Pickman’s Model,” though, (if I’m recalling correctly) is an example of his oh-dear-reader-I-can’t-describe-the horror brand of copout.
Lovecraft did have a tendency to make his heros faint too damned often, but it’s not true that he doesn’t describe the horrors – he describes Cthulhu explicitly and often enough. Heck, “Pickman’s Model” is mostly description. “A Shadow Over Innsmouth” is filled with description, and action, and a non-fainting hero. I could go on – Dunwitch Horror, Charles Dexter Ward, Whisperer in Darkness… Lovecraft doesn’t need defending against a charge that he doesn’t actually describe his horrors, or that his heros always faint.
Besides, I think fluffy pink teddy bears are pretty scary.
"…And as I turned the corner I saw the painting showing all of them at once. Can words describe such horrors? Just before I swooned, I caught a view of six miniature ursine forms, covered with nauseous fuzz like that on fruit that has gone forgotten in a drawer, save that these were tinged with bright hues. And in the Center of Each Chest was a Naked, Beating Heart!!!
Awright, I’m just starting to read “Call of Cthulhu” now, and damned if I’m not hooked already. Maybe the end will annoy, but I like the style of writing. I can readily see it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I find the somewhat archaic style of the prose, both real and feigned, to really augment the dreadfully bleak atomosphere. I mean, the first few sentances are words of cosmic dread…
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Cool! New dark age? Shit, sounds like George W. Bush’s presidency! I can dig it.
O.K., O.K., I should wait 'till it’s dark out, and read this in bed before falling asleep. What good’s a horror story without nightmares?
“…and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
Hee-heeeee! 
So, Lovecraft makes you giddy, eh?
Then Dunsany will make you drunk! Drunk on prose that scans like poetry! As he does for me…
sigh Thanks to you all, now I’ve tasked Amazon.com with completing my Lovecraft collection. Well, at least I’ve got a big box coming in the mail next week. Right now I’m rereading the Lovecraft anthologies I do have. Slortar ftagn…
Too bad I don’t have any gamer friends handy. I’m jonesing big time for the role playing game (the good version, not the d20 version). You have to love a game where the rules for insanity, fright and horror are longer and more comprehensive than the entire combat system.
…to say nothing of Clark Ashton Smith. Smith was highly regarded as a poet before he began writing horror fiction, and a lot of his stories are essentially brief prose poems.
You’re also going to like Machen and Blackwood.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, Chaosium printed a couple of volumes of Machen. Fantasy Masterworks issued a good volume of Smith’s fiction, and Dover Publications should have a best-of anthology of Blackwood. You really need to read the Blackwood stories “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”.