Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is known for his conjuring of "cosmic horror." But he was also a viscerally detailed reporter of urban milieux, whether aging New England towns, teaming metropolises, or fantastic mythic cities, from their denizens to their architecture. And it is in his writing about cities that Lovecraft's own underlying fears come through. These very real fears, which precede and inform the supernatural horror of his stories, reflect a xenophobic discomfort with change and otherness not uncommon to descriptions of the early 20th Century City, and certainly still very much with us today. As such, the weird fiction and horror of H.P. Lovecraft embodies xenophobia in multiple senses: intended to evoke terror through its renderings of the strange and unknown; also rife with the racist, anti-immigrant, anti-modernist language of its famously nervous, nativist scribe. This paper delves into the social reportage contained in several of Lovecraft's most urban writings, taking them as cultural data not only for their perspective (often brilliantly detailed and atmospheric), but also as a strange analogue to the classical urban sociology with which they are contemporaneous. It then moves to consider the reverberation of these tropes today, as well as some implicitly critical (anti-racist, and explicitly urban) rearticulations of the Cthulhu mythos itself in recent fiction.