Some really interesting and valid points here. Thanks.

Personally I always like to be aware of the craft that went into something, whether it's a written piece, a movie, or even my wedding ring. I agree it does often prevent full immersion, but it's the way I am. I did degrees in art and psychology and I worked as a costume prop-maker for 8 years, so whether we’re talking about how a suit of armour was made for a film or what an author was thinking as he wrote something I tend to look at the details. A piece of writing has to be pretty special to make me forget it's words on a page, but it does happen and HPL has managed it at times. The bits in the CM about the yawning gulfs of indifference in a universe not made for us can make me forget I’m holding a book; and the image of Nyarlathotep striding across a world in flames and ruin and uttering a never-ending scream has stayed with me so long I have no idea where I even read it!

I took from Jake W's post that the stories were making him uncomfortable because of where some of them are rooted, which is perfectly understandable.

That’s correct. A little uncomfortable. But for me it’s also a question of the effectiveness of HPL’s descriptions. With any art form the artist is trying to provoke or evoke something in the observer/reader, usually by drawing on their own experiences or feelings and representing them in a way others can access on some level. HPL wanted to convey horror, but also revulsion. The revulsion is often the stuff I have the most trouble with.
In The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath the description of the turbaned merchant with the bumps on his head is clearly meant to be revolting. I don’t find head-bumps revolting though (in fiction at least), possibly because I grew up watching Andorians on TV. As I listened to the part in the podcast where Carter is drugged I imagined one bump slipping from under the turban but saw it with an eye at the end of it glaring at Carter. This image made me shiver because of the contrast of the laughing (albeit an evil mirth) merchant with an intense inner malevolence revealed, perhaps involuntarily, from elsewhere on his body. More so than the fact I had imagined an eye where it shouldn’t be, which no doubt was an image my mind created from something as down to earth as a snail.
I’m not trying to claim I’m better at horror than HPL by the way! Just that to me a bump on the head doesn’t strongly convey ‘otherness’ and that, even if it had, ‘otherness’ is not horrific to me in itself so I suppose I must’ve subconsciously felt the need to embellish it so it stayed true to the spirit HPL intended.

Not to forgive the intellectual and moral failings of his xenophobia, but it's enough for me he wrote great stories, and his truly great story, IMHO, are about Cosmic Indifference, not scary foreigners.

I agree that the cosmic indifference is, on one level at least, terrifying. To my mind easily the best part of his legacy. Especially scary and unsettling if the culture you grew up in inculcates a belief in a nurturing, homo-centric universe.

What I’ve noticed is that ‘scary’ foreign and/or ethnic people in the stories are closer to the forces that inhabit and create that indifference; that their ‘alienness’ (i.e. the fact they’re not of Anglo-Saxon descent and with high, noble brows and upright posture, &c.)  allows them access to things so utterly abhorrent to the ‘right-thinking’ ‘well-bred’ protagonist that they are marked out as truly alien. This is where HPL falls over in my opinion and where his stories lose power.

I think what Jake W might be saying is that HPLs "Cosmic Indifference" is really Lovecraft applying that xenophobia to a planetary scale.  His aliens are the ultimate Other, inky black tentacled masses that have no real form, completely alien from the human condition. 
 

Exactly. And I’m not making a judgement about that. It’s interesting to me that perhaps HPL’s short-comings inspired some great work. When the xenophobia reaches the planetary scale it becomes, paradoxically, more accessible to me due to its utterly alien qualities.

I’m sure we’ve all had nightmares in which we’ve felt paralysing fear of something out of sight, something we can feel is behind us and we know means us harm, but can’t explain what it is. And if we try it suddenly sounds pathetic (my two most memorable examples are, if I merely describe what I eventually ‘saw’ in the dreams, a gorilla and a smoky figure wearing white Mickey Mouse gloves – totally lame! But in the dreams these were just vessels of the fear my brain was pumping around itself and the images alone can never capture the experience itself).
HPL’s genius is that, quite often, he is able to take the nightmares and put them in the minds of other people. He taps into universal fears. But he loses me when he relies on simple human-scale xenophobia.

…there is only two things we can do, "either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

And all too often it’s the foreigners who choose the latter path, bringing madness and doom to ‘civilised non-foreigners’.

I don't think HPL's Cosmic Indifference is a metaphor for anything.  I could be wrong but I think HPL really understood the cosmos could swallow our insignificant asses and not even realize it, even if we assume it had some agency.  Just my opinion.

I think this is, to a greater extent, true. I think he must have read about Einstein’s theories and had a good grasp of contemporary cosmology. He appreciated that the speck that is everything to us is miniscule by comparison to the wider universe.
Yet the dark powers are still interested in this speck and want it back.
Part of the horror comes from this threat of the outer to the inner and from those within that are complicit with the outer.
To make the threat seem real HPL had to draw on his own human experiences. His personal fears don’t always cut it with me (like the tube-train monster) as they relate very closely to his time, as does much of the xenophobia. Xenophobia is, to some extent, hard-wired in to our brains though, so it seems a good tool to use if you can disguise it enough to make it palatable. Where he doesn’t I don’t buy it. Where he does I’m right there with him buying in to the fear!

Ok, I'm aware this is a going to be a controversial topic and a proper can of worms no doubt, but here it is.

I found myself wondering if Lovecraft's ability to capture the revulsion at things we, as a species, might find so different they defy our understanding and challenge our sanity (or at least our ability to stay conscious and upright) stems from his wide-ranging bigotries. If I recall the list correctly it includes xenophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny and genral misanthropy.

When reading HPL I've sometimes found myself stepping outside the atmosphere he creates and wondering if I were presented with the same things would I be affected in the same way. I think this first occurred to me where he describes a creature rushing up through caves in a manner that to me sounded a lot like the trains on the London Underground (might have been Mountains of Madness, but it was a long time ago).

You could contrast HPL with the attitude used by Star Trek where tolerance is paramount. Consequently the 'alienness' of any race is played down as much as possible (leaving them with a perpetual problem of having to invent new bad guys without seeming racist). HPL builds up the 'otherness' and makes it a main feature of any encounter, regardless of motive and attitude of the creatures. Although these almost always turn out to be just as hideous.

I think the podcast has made the point at least once that some of the issues HPL deals with, and in which he predicts  the undoing of either his protagonist or society in general, are to the modern reader little more than scientific progress.

I suspect HPL was a Luddite and if he were alive today he'd be using an old ribbon type-writer and refuse to sully his hands with a new-fangled computer.

I don't agree with his outlook and if it is a significant contributing factor to his work I must admit that it makes me a little uncomfortable. But to take a broader view, his art was to be able to imagine and convey things beyond our normal realm of experience, and possibly it was this that contributed to his dislike of things 'other'.

 I say this because it often isn't clear where or when the fantasy stories take place, and some places, like Sarnath and Ulthar, seem to be prehistoric places that have been worked into the Dreamlands stories.  

I don't know if it was done consciously, but the blurring of boundaries works very well with the general Lovecraft weirdness. The fact that the cities mentioned could be in Earth's distant past or still exist in the dreamlands defies conventional understanding. That's what Lovecraft is all about isn't it?
Certainly with Yog-Sothoth he was playing with some ideas that mess with our limited views of time and space and even straying into the realm of theoretical physics (does anyone know if Lovecraft read much about Relativity and Quantum Mechanics?), but of course taking it a lot further and into darker places.

Holmes is a character of the latter catagory and I could easily have the same fate as the captain from The Temple.

I agree. Which is what led me to expect good things from the book, until I realised that the authors weren't prepared to put Holmes in that position.

It's not a question of Holmes's suitability as a protagonist in a Lovecraftian story, but rather a matter of compatibility between Arthur Conan Doyle's theme of an iron-willed character and Lovecraft's theme of descent into madness. Holmes is the immovable object being struck by Lovecraft's irresistable force. One of them has to give in or it won't work. Unfortunately it's Lovecraft who comes out worst in the collection.

Only one of the tales had Holmes even unsettled by his discoveries, while all the others (of those which featured Holmes - a couple featured other ACD characters such as Irene Adler) had him reasoning his way through, totally unaffected by his research into the occult (he had read the Necronomican in at least one of the stories) and reassuring Watson at the end. Watson is the one who nearly goes mad a few times.

The problem is, IMO, that the stories are not sequential. They're arranged in date order, but none of them occur in the same 'universe' so they don't draw upon a consistent Lovecraft-influenced background. Each re-invents the concept anew and attempts to stay true to the ACD characters. The traditional Lovecraft approach would have story after story describing Holmes descending into madness only to be back to normal for the next one. It wouldn't fit together well as a collection and I suspect the readers wouldn't believe it.
It's also possible that the authors were bigger fans of Holmes than of Lovecraft.

My favourite motif is possibly the deep time aspect, where the protagonist discovers things that are too old to have been made/written by human hands yet clearly were fashioned by some Earthbound intelligence. I love how the scale of space is coupled with the scale of time; monsters from unimaginable distances beyond our solar system co-exist with home-grown monsters from uncountable eons past.
Despite his frequent failure to describe the details satisfactorily Lovecraft always manages to convey a sense of things utterly alien.

My own method of writing the Mythos is to tone it down and make the creatures etc more in the background rather than the spotlight. I think that makes for more believability as well as more powerful fear.

Couldn't agree more.
Like many people, I was introduced to HPL through the game, but my friend who ran it had the same approach as you, Daniel. Rather than meeting Cthulhu or discovering an extended family of horrors we would spend months tackling mysterious but very human adversaries then, at some point calculated for maximum impact and horror, we might stumble across something utterly alien that tugged at the flimsy fabric of our sanity. But that thing would be a single creature, or piece of information relating to one relatively small thing. The astronomic scale and utter bleakness of the Cthulhu Mythos makes it impossible for a human mind to accept it and continue to function properly. Far better for a player or protagonist to meet someone who has already gone mad and experience horror due to the hints of far more shocking things they get from them!

With this in mind, the anthology I read recently 'Cthulhu By Gaslight', which pits Sherlock Holmes against eldritch powers, was doomed to fail despite some good writing (it contained Gaiman's 'Study in Emerald'). Holmes, with his unflappable faith in intellect and knowledge, is not the right kind of adversary for Lovecraftian mysteries, with their common aspect of being unfathomable and maddening. Worth a read though, but ultimately disappointing.