In the Desert of Madness

Okay. Wow. The Shadow Out of Time. I’m still a bit shaken. He actually asks all of the questions that the reader is asking himself the entire time. The narrative combines the best of all the techniques he’s developed. It’s kind of perfect. It’s an exploratory novel that manages to remain suspenseful and frightening. It hints at the characters created in previous stories and manages to not over-burden the reader with them. I really can’t say much about it other that the fact that I think it’s perfect.

That missing nothing

I don't know what to think. The Dreams in the Witch House, and actually all of the later things have been generally more well-written. I'm not distracted by character or plot elements, but something of the atmosphere is definitely missing. I think the focus on tangible concepts and events is a big part of this. I think about The White Ship or Erich Zann - where the struggle is mostly internal - or at least a psychologist would attempt to to convince one that the struggle is internal -- but then something externalizes it. Even From Beyond is an excellent example of the internal struggle externalized. So while the Witch House has all of the elements of a really scary story, I think it's missing the internal struggle and focuses on the externalization of the events which (really?) are internal.
The Evil Clergyman and The Book are really just lacking development. The Clergyman is like a full short story with all of the important (read: scary) bits edited out and The Book is just an exposition - there's no development and the climax happens before the story even started. It could have been great: a character who doesn't know if the event he's relating are past, present or future. It would be a nightmare to try and organize into a comprehensible text, but if it succeeded, it would be amazing.

lovecraft really is a shitty novel writer, but the short stories are awesome

Okay, let's just skip the bad, At the Mountains of Madness was horrible. Aside from the fact that it used the increasingly over-used device of setting something in a remote place (Antarctica) , and being just an explanation of setting—which, being in Antarctica, really doesn’t get you far, it was really just an historical record his “Elder Ones” on Earth… with an occasional, “Oh yeah, I was scared” or, “and this reminded me of how frightened I was”. Honestly, it would have been an awesome short story had the exposition of their leaving New England been omitted, their travel and arrival, and the first exploration party’s demise been omitted, and the story started with the two–man rescue team looking for the first party. After that, omitting the fake history of the “Elder Ones” (which really added little to the story, excepting how the shoggoths came to be and evolve) and you’ve finally got an interesting story.
No, let's forget all that and focus on Innsmouth, which is one of the scarier stories. Who of us doesn’t have an unknown ancestor and who’s to say who, or what, that ancestor did? And our future is equally unknown to us. Additionally, it finally made “ancestral birth places” relative to someone who knows nothing about his.
I swear, it’s like he knows I’m reading these.

vacation, expatriotism and self-canonization

Okay, I've had my vacation. Read lots during that time: The Colour Out of Space, The Thing in the Moonlight, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in the Darkness and the fictional histories. What was up with those? It was like he intentionally wanted to canonize his characters and event, locations, and items. Okay as a personal study to make sure that the world he's created would stay true to itself it would be okay, but to publish it jest felt icky.
The horror stories were sufficiently horrifying, and read in broad daylight. Although I think I've figured out why this love of his hometown, or ancestral ground annoys: a) I'm an expat b) I'm a black American. If there were any ancestral feeling I'd probably have to a place, they'd be in Africa: somewhere I've never been. And I voluntarily left the place of my birth; possibly because I don't have any irrational feelings holding me there.