Looking back across an interval of 40 years, I can't recall for sure whether I first became aware of H.P.Lovecraft as a writer or a rock band. It is more likely the writer because from my early teens I was devouring the sort of omnibus volumes of creepy short stories in which his work regularly appeared. Yet I see I was only 15 when I acquired the debut album from the US band who named themselves in his honour. Its release date, 1967 - exactly 30 years after Lovecraft's death - stares at me from the cover of the Philips LP as I write, as does the price tag revealing that it set me back a hefty (for those days) 38/6d (£1.92).

But even if the date hadn't been there, I could easily have worked it out. For the record was instantly recognisable as a relic of the Summer of Love, which had been followed by the Autumn of Silly Band Names. That November, Strawberry Alarm Clock topped the US chart with their ditty Incense and Peppermints. (To our credit, perhaps, the British record-buying public proved resistant to the appeal of that one.) If the swirly design of the artwork hadn't revealed H.P.Lovecraft's origins in 1967, the way its creators expressed themselves in statements on the album sleeve would certainly have settled the matter. According to the guitarist and singer George Edwards: "All we want is to be able to do our own thing. It's not easy to do - for some, next to impossible, but H.P.Lovecraft struggles on." But not for long as it turned out. Having relocated from Chicago to California - a much better venue for doing one's own thing, of course - they made a couple more albums, then disappeared from view.

By contrast, the man whose name they celebrated went on to become a bright star. By 1967, through the efforts of such disciples as August Derleth and Robert Bloch, his work was at last being treated with the respect it deserved. His stories, which could be read during his lifetime only in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, were now available between hard covers. These collected editions enabled readers to appreciate in its entirety a body of work that depended for its effect on the cumulative picture it presented of how the world might be. In essence, this is a chilling vision of a planet once occupied - and still visited - by extra-terrestrials, the 'Old Ones', who await the opportunity to rule here again, an ambition eagerly encouraged by their human agents who worship them as gods.

Some years would pass, however, before Lovecraft was to become the full focus of academic attention - the subject of painstaking research and lengthy biographies. Once these had been accomplished, he was at last ready to take his place as the 20th century's master of the macabre and a worthy successor to Edgar Allen Poe whose stories had haunted his nightmares as a child. I suspect, however, that he slightly remains - like Strawberry Alarm Clock - something of an American taste. Seeking to renew my acquaintance with his stories earlier this week, I visited three Oxford bookshops without finding any of his work. It was only at Blackwell's that I was eventually able to buy the 2002 Penguin Classics edition The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (£9.99). There was, however, no sign of its companion volumes The Dreams in the Witch House and The Thing on the Doorstep.

I had, as it happens, very recently reread The Call of Cthulhu, it being one of the two seminal tales added as an appendix to a recently republished critic appraisal of the writer by the French novelist (also essayist, poet and rap artist) Michel Houellebecq. H. P.Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £10) boasts an introduction by another Lovecraft fan, Stephen King.

Houellebecq offers a lucid and gripping account of the genesis of Lovecraft's tales, and an easy-to-follow analysis of how they work, especially in what he defines as "the great texts". These include, besides The Call of Cthulhu, which was written exactly 80 years ago, The Colour out of Space, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shadow over Innsmouth (all of which are in my Penguin edition), The Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dreams in the Witch House and The Shadow Out of Time.

It is an interesting illustration of how books strike readers differently that the veteran novelist Francis King could write it off in in his Spectator selection of books for Christmas. He said it was "intellectually swanky but dotty" and that he had had to persevere so hard as he read it for review that it made him "want to submit an invoice for ten times my usual fee". Curiously, two of the books he did like, Victoria Glendinning's Leonard Woolf and Christopher Hope's novel My Mother's Lover were among my favourites, too.

After the general excellence of Houellebecq's survey, I found last Sunday's Radio 3 feature on the writer, presented by Dundee University's Professor of Literature Geoff Ward, pretty thin in comparison. Points stressed in the book - for instance, that Lovecraft had absolutely nothing to say on the subjects of money and sex - were completely ignored in the programme. Nor did we hear of Lovecraft's understanding of such (for his time) cutting-edge science as relativity and quantum mechanics, which played a key role in his writing.