Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
H P Lovecraft is a lesser known, less mainstream and more cult-y version of Edgar Allen Poe. They both led messed-up lives, had totally bizarre love lives, and both were probably quite insane (Lovecraft probably even more so than Poe). They both wrote horror short stories which were bizarre and horrible, much more than the ordinary ghost stories their contemporaries were churning out. Lovecraft came quite a bit after Poe, and was probably influenced by him since he refers to him in his stories.
Lovecraft has managed to amass quite a cult following for himself, mostly freaky people who I suspect take his stories a bit too seriously. He's also inspired the moderately successful RPG Call of Cthulhu, which has in turn increased Lovecraft's own popularity. Some rather interesting items have been based on his writings, like a plush Cthulhu doll that I think is quite cool.
One thing about Lovecraft that occurred to me is that it's possible that some people read Lovecraft and think that it's more funny than scary. He does have a tendency to be melodramatic, and for some people saying that there's a nameless, dread horror surrounding something is more cheesey than creepy. I'm not one of those people. Nameless horrors creep me out fine, thank you very much.
Anyway, now let's go through the stories I've personally read:
The Call of Cthulhu
I read this one first, and I think that it makes a great introduction for any potential Lovecraft fan. It's written on a larger scale than the others I've read, with stuff happening all over the globe and a major Lovecraftian horror coming out to play. However, like most others, it starts with an ordinary person being drawn into an extraordinary world. The person in question is an anthropologist who finds some papers belonging to his recently deceased great-uncle. These papers lead him to find out about a strange and terrible little statue of an ancient god, Cthulhu, the priest of the dreaded Old Ones. He also learns about a global case of insanity that happened while his great-uncle was investigating this statue. This also coincides with someone his great-uncle was studying, a young painter who had strange and disturbing dreams during this period that were somehow linked to the statue.
Well anyway, things rush along at a crazy pace until the narrator gets to read the journals of a guy who came face to face with ol' Cthulhu himself... but I'll shut up now and let you read it for yourself, if you haven't already.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
This story was on a smaller scale to The Call of Cthulhu, but oh man, was it freaky. It deals with an architect, the narrator, passing through a strange town called Innsmouth. The residents of the surrounding towns are all scared of Innsmouth. The city is almost deserted, and most of its houses are empty. However, a goldworks still runs, and the fishermen still pull in large amounts of fish, even at times when the surrounding towns can't catch any fish at all.
To say more would give away some of the extremely creepy things that happen in this story. This one doesn't deal so much with Cthulhu as with the Deep Ones and their leader, Dagon (and of course Mother Hydra).
The story was probably number one so far in terms of making it hard to sleep at night. Let's just say that you might just find yourself looking in the mirror, and at people you know....
The Whisperer in Darkness
This story seriously kept me guessing right to the end. It builds the tension as it goes, and you never know what weird plot twist will come up next. This story deals with a professor of literature at Miskatonic University (a famous name for Lovecraft fans) who dabbles in folklore for fun. He hears tales of strange creatures seen floating in swollen rivers after a flood, and writes to all sorts of newspapers to try to convince the public that the people who reported these things were just seeing bloated human and animal bodies, not weird aliens. Then he receives a letter from an old man who lives alone near the hills where these creatures supposedly live, and he finds himself thinking that there might be more to these legends than he thought at first...
It's fun to try to figure out what will happen next in the story, and if you're like me you'll want to scream at the narrator at one point in the book. "You idiot! Why can't you figure it out? How can you be so dense?!" Right, anyway, this story is great for keeping you on your toes and never quite sure of what's really going on. One second you think you can see everything's that's coming up, and the next you're saying "Wait a second... that's not right..." as it turns out you have no idea what's going on after all.
Unlike the previous two, no major, ultra-powerful beings participate in this story, only the Appalachian variety of Mi-Go. But believe me, these guys are weird enough...
The Rats in the Walls
This is as close to the perfect Lovecraft story as I've come so far. It reads like something by Poe, except for the obligatory references to Lovecraftian horrors. The one thing that I didn't like about this story was that for some reason the narrator seemed to know what Nyarlathotep was. Lovecraftian monsters should be only known by Necronomicon scholars or people who've had dealings with the critters, and the narrator had neither. Okay, he had weird dreams about em (no big surprise there right?) but that shouldn't have given him any in-depth knowledge of one of the most powerful beasties out there.
Despite that one thing, the rest of the story is excellent. It's creepy, it's suspenseful, and it has a cool ending. Plus, other than that one passing reference, absolutely no Lovecraftian gods are mentioned in this story.
The Thing on the Doorstep
This story was published the year after The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and the two have a lot in common. They both deal with Innsmouth and its unholy curse. The Thing on the Doorstep, however, only has a few characters who are from Innsmouth in it, but believe me, they're Innsmouth folk through and through.
The story concerns the narrator's longtime friend marrying a woman from Innsmouth who shares his interests in magic and the occult. But things definitely aren't what they seem. Things get really weird when the new wife starts taking over the narrator's friend's body, and forcing him to stay in hers. She gets stronger and stronger each time, but sometimes her will breaks before she can return the body to Arkham where it lives, and the friend returns to his body in evil places...
The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger. I would have preferred to know what happened in the end, even if it's what I'm hoping didn't happen. Maybe you find out in another story.
In the Vault
This story has nothing to do with the Cthulhu Mythos. Instead it's more like a mainstream horror story in which a callous undertaker gets taught a lesson about mistreating corpses and building shoddy coffins when he gets stuck in the vault with all the dead, and he is forced to use the poorly built coffins to try to climb to safety.
Pickman's Model
Macabre art goes hand in hand with macabre tales, and in Lovecraft's time many of the major horror authors were also turning out horror paintings. In this story, the main character is one of the only people who still support the most macabre and horrible of the horror painters in New England, Pickman. This artist is famous for having an understanding of horror that the other artists don't have. One day, to thank the main character for supporting him, Pickman invites the narrator over to show him some pictures that he hasn't dared try to publish. Far from being pleased, the narrator is horrified with the paintings, which all portray horrible creatures that are half-man and half-dog as they feast on corpses. But what he sees in the basement, Pickman's studio, changes his life so much that he doesn't dare go into any basement any more....
This story is a perfect example of how Lovecraft builds up suspense. He starts the story off by saying that he doesn't dare go into basements any more, and here's why. As he talks about Pickman's house, he mentions that it's located in the oldest part of the city, in the area where they used to be witches and other strange things. It's only then that he details the visit to the house, the viewing of the paintings, and the discovery in the basement.
The Outsider
This is one of my personal favorites, simply because it's so amazingly strange and refreshingly cool. I can't say much about it really, except it starts with the narrator saying he was raised in an old castle by a strange man he barely remembers, and since the castle was surrounded so heavily by impenatrable forests he never saw the sky. All he knew about people he learned from the castle's prodigious libraries. Then one day he decided to climb the castle's ancient tower to finally see the sky...
The Colour Out of Space
This story, in my opinion, dragged quite a bit and wasn't very inspired. It read like a lot of other Lovecraft stories, without much to set it apart except for the fact that the strange villain in it was a color. Yes, a color. Go figure.
The Music of Erich Zann
A short, weird story that's actually pretty cool to read. A guy moves into a cheap apartment to find that the the weird old guy above him plays weird, haunting melodies on his violin in the middle of the night. He makes friends with the old man, but can never get him to repeat the melodies he plays at night. Until one time the narrator goes up to visit at night, and finds out what's really going on.
The Haunter of the Dark
A supposedly well-known case tells of a man who was killed one night during a power outage, in the middle of a lightning storm. All the windows of his apartment were shattered, so people thought it must have been lightning. His journal must have been the work of a madman, for surely the things inside couldn't really exist. The narrator of this story isn't so sure, and investigates the events leading up to that night and the strange death of the man. This story is actually pretty cool. Hey, you might even want to read it for the first time during a power outage, or at night with the lights off.
The Picture in the House
A guy trapped in a rainstorm goes into a dilapitated old house to find refuge. Inside he finds a freaky old man who seems to have an unnatural affection for an old book that he can't even read, and for one picture in that book in particular. This story is pretty short, but it's not all that creepy since you can basically figure out what's going on right off the bat. Still, it might produce some cheap shudders anyway.
The Dunwich Horror
As I have said earlier, there's a roleplaying game called Call of Cthulhu. Like all roleplaying games, it focuses on a group of adventurers battling bad critters and getting phat lewt. This is strange because most of Lovecraft's stories have a single protagonist, and the Cthulhu Mythos doesn't seem to particularly lend itself to group adventures. The Dunwich Horror is the exception to the rule.
The story itself deals with a freaky family that everyone knows deals with black magic. The albino, misshapen daughter of an old wizard has a son that animals hate and who grows up with unnatural speed. There are freakier things going on among the family though, and it falls to a group of experts who understand this sort of degeneracy to deal with the family, and with the horror they bring into the world.
Cool Air
A freaky old dude keeps himself alive using a cooling system, long after his body has naturally died.
The Terrible Old Man
Some strangers try to rob a freaky old man and obviously get their asses handed to them, since as you can guess he's called the Terrible Old Man for a reason, and the people of the town don't stay away from him just because he smells funny, if you know what I mean.
The Shadow Out of Time
The Great Old Ones were a race of funny-looking critters that lived way before man, probably around the time of the dinosaurs. Now stay with me here people, the reason we haven't found their remains is that they dissolve when they die (a common excuse for lack of evidence of Lovecraftian horrors in these stories). Anyway, these weird thingies could send their consciousnesses back and forth in time, swapping bodies with sufficiently advanced forms of life to learn about their cultures.
The story deals with one such swapped dude who accidenly retains some memory of what he saw back when he was in a Great Old One's body. He then hears about an archaeological dig in Australia where they found buildings that are a bit too familiar...