"cthulhu"
My standing position on Lovecraft is that his prose is almost unforgivably purple. I think his genius lay in the depth and darkness of his imagination, and that it's the substance of his dreams, rather than the pockmarked style in which he conveyed them, for which he is rightly celebrated by history. It's kind of like the way I feel about Bob Dylan's repertoire: Great songs, I just wish somebody else had sung them.
Still, I can't seem to get enough Lovecraft and/or stories in the tradition of Lovecraft. And as much as the die-hards have decried "Cthulhu" as an epigraph for the entire genre, I find it works best for me.