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You don't have to have read much of HP Lovecraft's fiction to develop a pretty decent awareness of what Lovecraft's fiction is generally all about. I've been picking through his stuff for the first time over the last few months, in fact, and the process feels a bit like archaeology. Oh, here's where that idea comes from, I'll say, whether the idea in question is the plot point in a Stephen King novel or the basis for the movie The Thing - and Who Goes There, the short story from John W. Campbell Jr. that inspired it. By this stage, reading Lovecraft is about discovering hidden depths - hidden influences, anyway - in many of the other bits and pieces you've already read or watched.Or played. Lovecraft's all over games - which is why it wasn't that surprising when The Call of Cthulhu recently turned up in a short list of books that an awful lot of game designers seem to have read. You could wish that designers had more wide-reaching tastes, perhaps, but the list itself probably represents a consensus - the overlap in a complex Venn diagram. Besides, Lovecraft's output works pretty well with games, so it was almost inevitable that they'd find each other eventually.
In part, that's because many of his most famous stories are about exploring. They're often about a surprisingly dim intellectual type off on an expedition that will take him far away from the things of man. As the text progresses, the natural landscape turns out to possess some rather unnatural features. Giant cities lurk atop plateaus, deserted but filled with clues of the monsters that inhabited them. You read on, and you start to feel haunted, and then hunted. You begin to suspect that the dead monstrosities you're hearing about may only really be sleeping.
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