I like him, too (as you already know), loved him as a teen, only sort of struck me how racist a lot of his stuff could be (especially his personal correspondence) when I got older and looked at it all anew, through more politicized eyes. According to L. Sprague de Camp's biography -- of which I have a signed copy! -- Lovecraft went sort of the opposite trajectory most folks go as they age.
That is, instead of getting more racist and conservative, he became less so as he grew older. Folks often point out he married an openly, proudly Jewish woman, despite personal anti-Semitic correspondence earlier on. And though when younger he had eccentric ideas that the US should have never revolted against England, that there should be a monarchy in power with aristocrats like himself in attendance (as he lived in poverty on cans of beans per day), etc., by the time of his death he was a devout supporter of FDR's New Deal, the National Recovery Act, the Works Project Administration, and, de Camp predicts, was gravitating more & more towards socialism.
Although his fairly early-ish death (at the age of 44 or so, right?) cut it all off.
About the fear of all of the stuff in his works (fish, architecture, etc.) -- well, horror writers make the ordinary into fearful, terrible things, right? It's horror, after all.
-B.