Polaris is one of the earliest things Lovecraft wrote, and it already contains the whole of him in miniature. A sleepless man watches the Pole Star through his window. The star seems to watch back, winking down with a knowledge that is patient and not kind. In sleep he becomes a watcher on the walls of Olathoe, a city in the land of Lomar, a thousand ages before any history we keep. The squat, hellish Inutos are coming over the snow. He is given the one task that matters, to hold the watch, and he fails it, because he cannot be sure which of his two lives is the dream and which the waking.
That uncertainty is the horror, and it is pure cosmic horror long before Cthulhu arrives to give the feeling a face. The cosmos is old, the human outpost is small and besieged, time is a trap you cannot see the edges of, and the thing that observes you from a great distance is not malevolent so much as indifferent. Everyone who calls Lovecraft a one-idea writer should be made to read Polaris first. The idea was there at the beginning, fully formed, staring down from the north.
Heard on The White Ships, where Polaris opens the record. Listen on Bandcamp.