In Lovecraft’s own words, "…all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large…To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. …when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold."

The enduring popularity of his work testifies that Lovecraft’s imaginary pantheon of alien races populating tales set in the bucolic backdrop of rural New England unqualifiedly succeeds in leaving the familiar behind.

An example of this, from “The Lurking Fear”: (1922)

"...Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scenes; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation ..."

If you consider yourself an aficionado of horror, the weird, the macabre, ya gotta love Lovecraft.