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I really hate how ignorant geeks have reduced HP Lovecraft's aesthetic to such a narrow aspect of his work. Lovecraft is about a lot more than cosmic horror, and cosmic horror is about a lot more than darkness, tentacles, and monsters from Outside. 
An under-appreciated aspect of Lovecraft's work: old New England nostalgia. Many of his stories deal with the beauty and familiarity of that heritage, and his struggle with encroaching modernity and foreignness. This is his inspirational model for cosmic horror.
But the New England familiarity, challenged by modernity, is itself a recent and transient encroachment on a much older and more alien world. This is another theme in Lovecraft's work: the transience of man's works compared to the unfathomable age of our surroundings.
Cosmic horror is Lovecraft's personal philosophical struggle with New England's, and therefore man's, transience and irrelevance in an ancient world that will gradually grind away all hope and familiarity.
You would be wrong to peg Lovecraft as a mere reactionary against everything foreign and alien. He starts there, but boldly delves into the horror to look for more robust identity. For example: how he eventually identifies five sided ancient aliens as fundamentally brother men.
Everyone gets Lovecraft wrong. Even my own articulation of his essence here is a simplistic compression. The man deserves more serious philosophical study, not just more geeky "cthulu mythos" caricature.
