"One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about," Lovecraft wrote to fellow science-fiction writer James Blish. And indeed, most of what he offers up are tantalizing clues, that creeping sense of horror. In one of his final stories, "The Whisperer In Darkness" (1930), a professor from Lovecraft's invented New England school Miskatonic University is lured to the Vermont cabin of a crazed conspiracy theorist. During an all-night conversation with what turns out to be the decomposing body of his host, animated by alien beings, the professor learns presumably the entire mystery of this other realm, a thing we the readers never get a chance to fully know. In typical Lovecraft fashion, the knowledge nearly drives our protagonist mad: "Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcane of basic entity – never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry."

Other stories such as "Pickman's Model" (1926), "The History of the Necronomicon" (1927), and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (1927) offer up the evidence we might find in the archaic archives of an unsolved crime: journal entries from unfortunate souls who fell afoul of the transdimensional monsters and their devotees, police reports, witness statements. Here is exhibit B, a most unusual and otherwordly item of jewelry on display at the Miskatonic University museum. Here in their locked-away collection you'll find the feared Necronomicon, written by the "mad Arab" Abu Aziz, a name that Lovecraft took on during his elementary school fascination with Middle Eastern lore. Here's the testimony of a heartbroken father whose son was possessed by an ancient worshipper of the demonic Yog Soggoth and then disintegrated.

There is something of Stoker in this collage of firsthand documents and local lore told with thick, regional accents. But Lovecraft and his denizens were never as lusty or glamorous as the count. The elder gods simply want to wipe the Earth clean so they can restart their own tentacled civilization, and the protagonists give nary a damn about love or money; their forward fire is lit by the deep desire for knowledge. Something is very, very amiss in the world and these mild-mannered college professorly types will stop at nothing to find out what.

But it's not from some heightened sense of justice or the need to save the world that compels them so much as a haunting, inexplicable desperation. They are afraid, and remain so throughout entire stories, right up until they meet their grisly end or, occasionally, outwit the demon gods and their worshippers and make it away only bruised and distraught. Lovecraft offers up no heroes, although we get several noble bands of vigilantes risking it all to lay waste to the odd gigantic invisible menace. Rather, we have the passively curious observer, usually doomed. Lovecraft's philosophy has been (hilariously) described as cosmic indifference, in part because he doesn't seem invested in the survival or nobility of his characters, but rather serves them over to get chomped up in ignoble, useless deaths.

Even when told without the use of firsthand accounts, Lovecraft's prose can take on a cautious, reportorial quality. This is the crouch. You get the sense he's only exercising such restraint to earn the inevitable rhetorical and conceptual explosions later on.

When he pounces, there is a palpable release of tension. Lovecraft is an overwriter, and when he gets excited the adjectives do tend to pile on. And what is exciting in the twisted world of elder gods and comely intellectuals? Usually, architecture. Cities and quaint New England townships shine in brilliant effervescence in the waning sun, horrific towers glare down on twisted inner sanctums of terror as unseemly denizens shuffle and ooze beneath. Even in his personal writings, biographer Donald Tyson points out, the height of Lovecraft's breathless prose is reserved not for his wife but the first time he glimpses the snow-covered roofs of Marblehead, Mass., a moment which he describes as "the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence."

Amid this world of cyclopean towers and quiet, sunlit steeples, Lovecraft deploys his self-destructively curious professors, poets, and anthropologists. They brave horrific, gut-wrenching situations, keep coming back for more, but the greatest terror, the final Lovecraftian reveal is often one that turns inward, reaching back to the depths of family genealogy.

"In climbing towards the goal of making robots appear human," Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori wrote in 1970, "our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley."

The uncanny valley is that slim in-between stage, where characters look very real indeed but not quite real enough. The resulting weirdness has an unsettling effect on the audience — we don't know how to process these mutant neither here nor there monsters. As Mori states, "One might say that the prosthetic hand has achieved a degree of resemblance to the human form, perhaps on a par with false teeth. However, when we realize the hand, which at first site looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny." Animators soon learned the hard way that movies whose characters fell within the Valley (notably, The Polar Express) inevitably tank.

Lovecraft pitches a tent in the Uncanny Valley and releases more than a few of his unfortunate inbetweeners from there. Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family chronicles several generations of explorers: "The Jermyns never seemed to look quite — something was amiss." Indeed. After a sprawling enumeration of the various Jermyns, which keeps us intrigued only by virtue of occasional freakish details — Grandpa Jermyn killed an explorer who told him about a mysterious African city ruled by white apes, then killed two of his own children; the surviving son Alfred Jermyn became a circus trainer, had an unusually close relationship with a white haired ape, attacked it and was killed — we find Arthur Jermyn, who quickly sets himself on fire after receiving a mysterious package that turns out to be a mummified white ape that turns out to by his grandmother!

The Shadow Over Innsmouth begins as a travel log. It's restrained, matter of fact, almost bland but again stays afloat by way of masterful deployment of eerie details. As is typical of Lovecraft, we know from the opening lines that something horrible happens later: There's a government raid, folks barely make it out alive, chaos will come, he promises: "Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth." So we read on: Robert Olmstead, our mild-mannered narrator is fascinated by archeology and ends up in Innsmouth, this creepy little town that not even the residents of nearby Arkham, also a creepy little town, will venture to. The Innsmouth folks have a strange, fishlike quality to them: "Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald too, very young." By accosting the town drunk — the exceptionally named Zadok Allen — our narrator gets a lecture on the whispered ancient origins of these Uncanny Valley dwellers. It's all pretty standard horror story fare: Things get worse and worse and the possibility of escape bleaker and bleaker until all out chaos erupts and our hero is dashing through the midnight Innsmouth streets, enacting the curious hobble-walk of its fishlike inhabitants until he can make it out of town just as the FBI swoops in to tear the place up.

But the story doesn't end there. Lovecraft's value system for horror isn't satisfied by a mere chase and escape motif when there are deeper levels of disgust for which to reach. Having escaped Innsmouth, Olmstead's fascination, like Jermyn's and, in fact, Lovecraft's, turns to his own family history, which he eventually traces back to the very aquatic monsters he'd barely gotten away from. He doesn't just come to accept this fact; Olmstead embraces it. "I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton madhouse," he plots as the story draws to a close, "and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through the black abysses to Cyclopean and many columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."