Eldritch?

The publisher, The Library of America, has done the nation a great service by re-publishing a good selection of classic American works ranging from collections of essays to short story collections to novels. The physical books are what hardcopy books should be. They are made of good acid-free paper, the pages are trimmed, the covers are of a pleasing green and each book has a sewn in ribbon book mark.
I recently bought the Library of America edition of a collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. If you're not familiar with Lovecraft, he was a writer of what are often called "weird tales" that were published mostly in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Strange Tales during the early 20th century. He was associated with Robert E. Howard (the author of the Conan the Barbarian stories), August Dereleth (the author of the Solar Pons stories) and Robert Bloch (the author of Psycho). There are two movies that come to mind that were based on Lovecraft stories -- The Dunwich Horror, which was made in the early 70s, and Re-Animator, which was made in the late 80s or early 90s. Neither film was very faithful to the source material.
It's always dangerous to read short story collections by one author straight through, the reason being that unless the author is varied in his or her topics and themes, such as Maugham or London or Hemingway, one runs into the situation of feeling that one has waded through the swamp of one story while reading another. Once one has read about the first quarter of the Library of America edition of Lovecraft's stories one has read the best. The first one fourth of the stories are of the straight horror type. After that they fall into the Cthulhu Mythos, which, if one is not familiar with it, can get pretty grating if one doesn't have the taste for "unearthly geometry," "shuggoths," "the Old Ones," or "the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred." Reading the story At the Mountains of Madness makes one wonder if Lovecraft hadn't suffered some sort of psychological trauma at an exhibition of early cubist paintings.
Granting that Lovecraft was a pulp writer, one can't expect him to get out of his furrow of phraseology and word usage as one would expect, oh, I don't know, the lesser educated Jack London to do. In fact, Lovecraft's style is an attempt at an older writing style than London's. Lovecraft seems to have aspired toward a style somewhere between Regency and Victorian. Jane Austen's style is less jarring on the modern ear. Lovecraft seemed to have felt the need to use the word "eldritch" in ninety percent of his stories. It's too bad that he didn't try writing Old English a la Beowulf. If he had he might have gotten away from his obsession with "weird geometry" and stuck with horror stories, which he was pretty good at churning out.
In reading over the stories (and after a while they have a curious somnambulent quality which makes them good for bedtime reading) it suddenly hit your faithful correspondent that in his later writings Lovecraft was writing for a circle of friends instead of the public in general. There are references in the stories to stories written by friends and in order to get the fully intended impact of the references one would have to have read those stories. It's not unlike an outsider eavesdropping on the conversation among the regulars at a bar. One can get the big picture, but when the regulars refer to "Shorty's problem" one knows neither who Shorty is nor what his problem is.
But to get to cases. The best stories in the LoA volume of Lovecraft stories are: The Statement of Randolph Carter, Herbert West - Reanimator, The Horror of Red Hook, Pickman's Model, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. For almost everything else get out your weird protractor and your unnatural trig tables, and be prepared to figure out was a shuggoth is. Or is it suggoth?