Reading Weird Tales: what made Lovecraft stand out

Before Lovecraft gained universal popularity, he gained a loyal following as Weird Tales writer. What people often miss in the latter part is that the following was among Weird Tales readers, who would have great exposure to stories published in Weird Tales. I feel that the analysis of what made Lovecraft stand out from the crowd is often missing.

After reading a number of issues where Lovecraft's work was published, I feel that the following factors had a major contribution to his initial posthumous success:

1. Stories published in Weird Tales heavily leaned on an already established and largely beaten to death lore of ghosts/vampires/werewolves/etc. Lovecraft, consciously, tried to avoid further crowding the field by working with completely different entities. He also, for some time, avoided recycling his ideas; while it probably protected his brand from dilution, it also meant that he made considerably less money than he could.

2. A typical Lovecraft story is a story of discovery through enquiry; a typical Weird Tales story is a story of discovery through action, and, perhaps, adventure through action. Lovecraft carefully writes whatever little conversations his stories have as either retellings with relevant information, or only important parts, mostly as monologue; a typical Weird Tales story would follow a more conventional format, with dialogues showing emotions/motivations/interactions, however, more often than not, very poorly written.

3. Lovecraft's stories are light on action. Perhaps it comes from the fact that Lovecraft didn't really write it well (the events in Innsmouth after hotel escape can be used as an illustration - and this is Lovecraft trying to write a more conventional action-heavy story), but I think it was a conscious choice in favor of more inquiry-focused writing. Perhaps this is the surprising aspect, but overall content of Weird Tales leaned heavily into Robert Howard territory, and not only because of Robert Howard.

4. Lovecraft carefully used the freed up space by investing into descriptions/thoughts/atmosphere. This what makes me think that relatively sparse action descriptions were a deliberate choice; if you fight through ten rooms of cultists, you can't humanely describe the rooms or the cultists.

5. Lovecraft was very careful about describing his key objects in a way that ensured they would stand out. In this regards, he had a very good sense of style. Think about The Picture in the House: most writers would write it extremely mundanely about a horrible old tome or something. Lovecraft makes you feel it is something special.

6. Thesaurus and English. Most authors had much worse command of English.