Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention this, but when I re-read the Call of Cthulhu this past week, I remembered something that I had forgotten about Lovecraft: namely, that the return of Cthulhu/The Great Old Ones doesn't actually an Apocalypse. The point of Cthulhu being called back isn't that he's going to destroy the human race, but that he's actually going to usher the human race into a new era. Lovecraft writes that The Great Old Ones will be released when the stars are right, which is also at a point when humanity will have moved "beyond good and evil and become like The Great Old ones." At that point, Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones will return and become the gods of humanity, teaching them to revel in a kind of violent orgy based on the ultimate truth of doing whatever you can to feel good. It basically supposes that civilization is a necessary delusion to ward off abject anarchy and chaos, but a delusion nontheless. I think this is why Lovecraft is sometimes compared to Nietzsche.