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.