Blame some of the satire pieces I found this past week for convincing me to dig my old collection of H.P. Lovecraft's stories out of my pile of books.
Talking about why I really do like Lovecraft's horror stories probably means starting with the things that will make me dislike a horror story. I don't like the jump scares or buckets of gore that a lot of games and movies in this genre seem to rely on to terrify or disgust the audience. I particularly don't like it when the protagonists get themselves in trouble by virtue of doing something absurdly stupid, or when they aren't capable of stopping the implacable horror stalking them because they're not smart enough to make good decisions.
Lovecraft's protagonists aren't like that, as a general rule. Many of them are supposed to be intelligent people and are written in a way that actually makes them seem intelligent. There's the odd stupid decision involving digging a bit too deeper than one should, but by that time the protagonists are generally doomed already anyway. And the implacable horrors of Lovecraft's works generally are insurmountable threats no matter how smart the protagonists are... they see some measure of success against merely mortal cultists and magicians, and even manage to temporarily stave off the elder gods on rare occasions, but in the end there's only so much mortal investigators can do. This sort of horror story built off of a convincingly terrifying implacable creeping doom is quite a bit more interesting to me than the alternatives.
Of course, there are flaws. Largest is the fact that like all too many people in the 1920s, Lovecraft was horribly racist, and it shows. It's not just a matter of the (irritatingly common) occasional throwaway remark about any non-white people being inferior, either - in several of his stories, the madness stalking the protagonists involves a reversion or degeneration to a more flawed form of humanity... and that generally always involves mixed breeding or flawed bloodlines. It's a serious problem, and there's not much to be done about it but ignore it if you can or just don't read them.
More happily, there's also a wealth of good stuff that is based off of the Cthulhu Mythos, ranging from other books and stories to TV shows, games, anime, and all sorts of other things. It's quite possible to enjoy this particular horror setting even without having read the original material.
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