Whats is the best Lovecraft story of all time and why ?

I think it would either boil down to The Call of Cthulhu or The Dunwich Horror. The Call is a good explainatory story of what the Mythos is and The Duniwch Horror is HPL's only full length story that feels Supernatural as opposed to ancient alien beings.

The Call of Cthulu, becuase it was the first to talk about the mythos specifically and soley

I like At the Mountains of Madness because it pretty much dashes Derleth's assertion that there is a mythos at all against the rocks.

I appreciate how Lovecraft liked to keep things intentionally confusing; to avoid having the body of work he, his protégés and predecessors wrote of, shoehorned into such a dichotomy and easily defined mythology. Maintaining only tenuous and esoteric ties to one another.

I often wondered how Lovecraft would have felt about Derleth's attempt to force a Christian moralistic framework upon his mythos, so called. Especially when you consider Lovecraft's hatred (really) for religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian ethic. As outlined in his "The Judaeo-Christian mythology is NOT TRUE" letter

With the disclaimer that I have not read all of Lovecraft's stories, my favorite is "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."  It manages to be fascinating, exciting, scary, and haunting, something that none of his other stories (that I have read) quite pull off.

JJHB83 said:

I like a number of different stories so far, and I even like one that I didn't think as well of previously. I believe overall that I am not able to enjoy any of his stories until I feel that I have confidence in it, and than finally I can enjoy it (including listening to the audio recordings). I have tried to listen to an audio of a certain story and the words go in one ear and out the other ear without any comprehension what so ever because I would find myself falling asleep. Yet if I have a grasp of a certain story after I have carefully read it a number of times, than I can start to enjoy because I finally have confidence. That is when the story may bring a spiritual awakening and that the experience that I would like to achieve, therefore the best story is the one that has been kind, for I am kind.

Basically it isn't good enough to read a few of them because the author writes quite a number of them in a similar way which has a person guessing or piecing together, so that they are a combined story. There is no single best story but it is more like earth, air, fire, and water, so there might be a best single one for earth, and a best single one for water, etc.

Hellfury said:

I have generally the same take, on both counts.

My favorite short tale of his is probably The Cats of Ulthar, From Beyond, or Music of Erich Zann.  All of those stories have elements of Lovecraft's overall fictive worldview: dreamlands/ancient histories, the horrors that surround us in the everyday world, mad science, crazed written explanations, fainting/lost memory, and cats.

As far as long form tales, I really like The Shadow Over Innsmouth as well as The Dunwich Horror, but a lot of that is influenced by Robert M Price's take on the stories as heard on HPPodcraft podcast.