For Lovecraft's 'cosmicism' to attain full flower, he'd have had to give up his (meta)fictional conceit of Ancient Races Lying Dormant - it's a philosophical copout. If your supposed philosophical point is that humanity is insignificant, it's enough to pit man against Nature, or Thermodynamics, or Chance...but that wasn't Lovecraft's point; or at least that wasn't where his heart resided. His emotional connection to his 'cosmicist' philosophy must be located in his obsessive return to his mythology of malign forces from Beyond. In other words, while 'The Call of Cthulhu' is a brilliant work of fiction in its own right, I'd say 'The Dunwich Horror' is closer to the center of Lovecraft's imaginarium, because its stakes are more accessibly human. Its horror might be invisible, but it can at least be directly felt.
Critics' dogged insistence on HPL's writing as 'cosmic horror' obscures the fact that it's horrific only to the extent that it happens to human beings - which is of course the opposite of 'cosmicism' if you take it halfway seriously, wuntcha say?
