Quoth scotandrsn:
Point taken. All I’ve read of Lovecraft is a few short stories (I don’t recall which ones), and they left me unimpressed enough that I haven’t sought out any more. Quite possibly, I just happened to stumble across a few of the more lackluster ones, if what you say is true. I might give some of the recommendations in this thread a second chance.
I have to wonder, what is it about this guy that inspires such a proliferation of tributes, nods, references, cultish followings, and so forth?
Look at this:
http://www.k4d4th.org/cthulhufhtagn/penguin-hat-tentacles.png
Red Hat Cthulhu?
Cal, Cal Cal…
I bow down in humble awe before you.
Been a while since I read it, but IIRC, the hero in Shadow does faint, near the end, and credits that with saving his life, allowing him to leave Innsmouth and tell what he saw.
The other points are right on, though.
Oh, and I’d just like to reccomend my favourite Lovecraft stuff: Herbert West: Reanimator.
Also see here.
Jorge Luis Borges.
Carry on.
I’m not really that big of a Lovecraft fan. Sure, I’ll pick it up if it’s cheap, but I didn’t like his prose style. It’s like cheesecake: good in small doses, but too thick to take much at once.
Re Description
Mountains Of Madness, Shadow Over Innsmouth and a few others are quite descriptive. Some others are indeed ‘it was horrible.’. Besides simply avoiding giving too much detail and rendering things mundane and fixed, Lovecraft was also attempting to convey the idea that somethings were indescribable. Cthulhu isn’t a fat guy with webbed feet, stunted wings, and an octopus for a head. That’s just the closest the human mind can get. The sight of the denizens from nameless reaches beyond the human sphere is enough to shatter the human mind. Should one see them and remain sane, the memory is largely blocked out.
Non-human minds, on the other hand, do just fine, as ably demonstrated by Miaowara Tomokato. 
I just finished reading a collection of Robert E Howard stories in the vein of Lovecraftian horror (while waiting for afore-mentioned monster shipment of Lovecraft stories to come in). It’s amusing to see his take on it. The typical pattern goes:
Burly hero sees cosmic monstrosity.
Usual raving about unbelievable mind and sanity shattering cosmic horror
Hero leaps across the room and beats the crap out of the monstrosity, with his bare hands, if necessary.
Actually, they’re surprisingly good if you don’t mind a healthy dash of Conan mixed in with your eldritch horror.
Would that be Nameless Cults ? It doesn’t sound like that… 
I’ve got a copy of that.
IMO, and attempting to avoid spoilers, the final monster in the Hellboy movie is based on the worm in Howard’s Valley Of The Worm
“I call it a worm for lack of a better term. There is no earthly language which has a name for it. I can only say it looked somewhat more like a worm than it did an octopus, a serpent or a dinosaur.
It was white, and pulpy, and drew its quaking bulk along the ground, worm-fashion. But it had wide, flat tentacles, and fleshy feelers, and other adjuncts the use of which I am unable to explain. And it had a long proboscis which it curled and uncurled like an elephant’s trunk. Its forty eyes, set in a horrific circle, were composed of thousands of facets of as many scintilant colors which changed and altered in never-ending transmutation.”
The worm in the film was green, and I don’t recall the eyes changing color. But I’m sure it’s the creature from Howard’s valley.
Kind of interesting to hear that.
Robert Howard’s best Lovecraftian stuff is collected in the book above mentioned, and as a rule, his heroes tend to be much more two-fisted than Lovecraft’s… but their guts still turn to water when the uuuugly stuff shows up.
See:
“The Fire of Ashurbanipal”
“The Thing On The Roof”
“The Black Stone”
…in particular. The only stories I CAN think of where Howard’s hero leaps on the monster and beats the crap out of it were “The Valley Of The Worm” and another one, from one of his other collections, where an outlaw, fleeing an armed posse, stumbles into a cave full of subterreanean reptile horror people.
Both protagonists fight like hell, and win. And then, both protagonists die.
No. I never heard of the book you linked to until I clicked on the link.
Some paperback publisher, a while back, put out The Robert E. Howard Library, several volumes, consisting of a LOT of Howard’s non-Conan fiction. One volume was Solomon Kane stories, another was Corman mac Art, a third was Texas-flavored horror stories, and so on.
The Texas-flavored horror stories volume was Trails In Darkness, and I believe that’s where the story I mentioned was found. Durned if I can remember what the story was called, though…
I’ve got Trails In Darkness ; it’s fun.
But Nameless Cults is much, much better. Get it.