What CorporateDrone said about shifting tastes bears out in my case (I admit I started out with Metallica too. Then I went straight to Carcass.) . For years I refused to listen to black metal because of the vocals. Then I found a few albums I could tolerate, and branched out from there. Now I listen to far more…

No cookie monster vocals?

I enjoyed "Slania", but for folk metal, Windir is still my go-to band.

If you didn't like "The Codex Necro", there's something wrong with you.

We history nerds in the Ist Krieg household enjoyed it, but we agreed that it would have been more fun if they had handed it to David Milch and let him get all "Deadwood" with it.

"The Corner" is good, and it has the added bonus of having some of the same actors as "The Wire" in radically different parts.

"Some great ideas, but the execution's off. "

Wait, so you're saying it WASN'T my Napalm Death US Grindcrusher Tour 1991 t-shirt that initially attracted my wife to me?

The elemental thing was pretty poorly conceived, since the water elemental is imprisoned under water and Derleth had to create Ithaqua (air) and Cthugha (fire) to fill the gaps.

Chaosium has a complete collection of Howard's Mythos stories called "Nameless Cults". There is a fair amount of overlap with his Bran Mak Morn series.

But they're murals of SHOGGOTHS!

The one I have is a four-volume hardcover set from Arkham House.
"Dagon And Other Macabre Tales"
"The Dunwich Horror And Others "
"At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels"
"The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions"

Next next steps
After you're done with HP, track down Chaosium's series of Mythos paperbacks. They're as good a collection of Lovecraft pastiches as you're going to find, encompassing both his contemporaries and later adherents. Several volumes are dedicated to writers who influenced Lovecraft, like Arthur Machen,…

That was my gateway. A few months after I started listening to Metallica, I found the '60s paperback edition of "Tales Of The Cthulhu Mythos" lurking on a bookshelf at my grandmother's house and wondered why the title was spelled wrong.

I don't think "Hammer Into Anvil" is one of the lesser episodes though.

If I could own just one doom album, it would unquestionably be Winter's "Into Darkness". Suffocating, punishing, and utterly bleak, it's as grim and frostbitten as anything out there.

It ain't metal, but download a copy of "An Electric Storm" by White Noise. "The Visitations" and "The Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell" will creep everyone right the fuck out. "Isolated House" by Horchata has some great atmospheric dark ambient tracks as well.

Seconded on Catacombs.

I think the new Gorgoroth is pretty solid, if unspectacular. The kick drum tone is strangely lifeless, and the drums are a bit high in the mix, which doesn't help. It's also a little more thrashy/deathy than I expected. "Satan-Prometheus" is the most purely black metal song, and it's no surprise that it's the best…

I think there's an argument to be made that Death is the Beatles of death metal.