We all own a time share in the mouth of madness

My fandom of HP Lovecraft is a strange thing. I've read three collections of short works and enjoyed them all to varying degrees while recognizing several flaws in his writing. The most obvious one, to me, is the blatant repetition. There is a definite similarity to most of his stories and a clear formulaic arc. Almost all of the stories are first person accounts of someone, frequently psychologically disturbed, who has survived a brush with some indescribable horror. The character usually has gone at least partially insane from what he has seen or has found that his lineage has been tainted by some kind of outside monstrous influence. Some have seen this as a clear parable for miscegenation and I can't really argue with that. The writing is also very much of its time, light on dialogue and slowly paced. This isn't something specific to Lovecraft but is a feature of turn of the century writing and I find it contrary to my tastes most times.
So why do I love this racist, repetitive, poorly paced writing? There are a couple of reasons, the first owing to the actual writing and the second being more of my own creation. HP Lovecraft, much like I see myself, is an idea man. The writing is not so much about character or plot or insight on the human condition (though it frequently does these things well enough) but is about ideas. Big ideas and big themes. Space gods, mutation, body horror and the unknowable unknown are his stock in trade. With him we are firmly out of the realm of the plausible (no serial killers here) and all the better for it. Lovecraft is a horror writer but his brand of horror is quite different than other writers such as Stephen King. One difference is that often the antagonists are not malevolent per se. The elder gods that are featured in his stories are often dismissive of humanity rather than actively trying to harm it and, to me, that is scarier. The creatures are more force of nature than villain and are totally alien in thinking. They can not be reasoned with or even understood or sometimes even viewed safely as the non Euclidian geometry of their forms tends to break the minds of their viewers.
It's this last aspect that I want to talk about. For years I have been fascinated by the idea of something being so big that it drives one insane. In the works of HP Lovecraft this is represented by gigantic tenticled beings or the realization that your ancestors had sex with fish men. In these stories this knowledge frequently breaks ones mind. It seems farfetched but in reality it is not. We regularly cope with realities equally horrible. The human mind possesses a quality where it frequently simultaneously knows something and is practically ignorant of it. Take the old rhetoric standby, the holocaust. This event, much like an elder space god, is simply too big to practically understand. Most people know about the holocaust, know the numbers involved, and the means, but those things lack an emotional impact in all but those directly or indirectly involved or those exceptionally empathetic few. In my day to day life I never think about the holocaust. How could I, really? Evil on that scale is unknowable.
One could argue that it's the literal size, ie the numbers, involved in this that make it so abstract. This is reasonable. No one knows as many people as have died in the holocaust. It becomes a statistic. However, even when you look at events on a smaller scale you can frequently find things that match the level of horror. I have been told, and I don't have the source for this, that there have been rumors in some parts of Africa that the only way to cure AIDS is to have sex with a virgin. Some men have ascribed to these rumors and have taken to rape in an attempt to cure themselves. Other things are better documented. Genital mutilation is a well known practice in the middle east. After the Chernobyl meltdown, the government sent in clean up workers wearing faulty and inadequate protective gear. I feel it is safe to say that at any given moment, someone, somewhere, is being skinned alive or set on fire. One can know all of these things and simultaneously have a bad day at work because a Mounds bar did not deploy from a vending machine.
Humanity's capacity for evil is not news. What I'm saying is interesting is our ability to ignore that capacity. And presumably, some people lack that ability. I remember reading about the beltway snipers a few back and in an interview with the principle shooter, he cited the overwhelming horribleness of the world as a contributing factor in what made it seem ok for him to go out and randomly start shooting people. I do not sympathize with the snipers or condone their actions but this logic, or lack thereof, makes a kind of sense to me. The idea echoes Lovecraft and there is an interesting parallel to me in seeing Chthulhu and spending the rest of your days in a New England asylum and in fully realizing the dire state of the world and going on a shooting spree. Luckily most peoples minds contain this quality (for lack of a better word, let's call it The Gary Factor) and few people go crazy and start a war on human decency.