If you’re unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s short stories or his Mythos, you might want to read some of them. Fortunately for those of us in the US the copyright has expired, so they are all online. You may find them here

. If you haven’t read any, you should start immediately (heh) with ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ for some flavor.

Other good stories (in my not so humble opinion) are ‘Cool Air’, ‘Dreams in the Witch House’, ‘Herbert West-Reanimator’, ‘Colour out of Space’, ‘The Dunwich Horror’, ‘Haunter of the Dark’, ‘Horror at Red Hook’, ‘Shadow out of Time’, and ‘Whisperer in the Darkness’.