H.P. Lovecraft… way ahead of the curve as usual. He was interested in, and read deeply into, the Ancient Roman Stoics and Epicureans. After about 1930 he came increasingly to live aspects of such a life, in a modified personal form well-adapted to shrugging off the turmoils and tribulations of the 1930s.

Now, like Lovecraft himself, these philosophies have become a small industry. The TLS this week reviews a shelf on new books on the topic (e.g. How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life) and reveals that the movement also has its share of get-rich-quick empire-builders…

… the Stoic revival extends beyond the bookstore. … The Stoa-curious can now head to dailystoic.com to have philosophical wisdom delivered to their inboxes or order a “Memento Mori medallion” from the online store. At modernstoicism.com they can sign up to “live like a Stoic for a week”. Real enthusiasts can attend an annual convention, Stoicon, held (at least before Covid) in cities across the world, to hear talks by classical scholars like Long or movement luminaries

Yet the reviewer finds the movement’s recent crop of short manuals and introductions, all from weighty university presses, to be worthy and faithful to the originals…

to a perhaps surprising degree, [these modern] Stoic treatises really are self-help manuals.

So it sounds like you could do worse, if you wanted a modern and readable introduction to this aspect of Lovecraft’s life in the 1930s. The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft is also your go-to book on this aspect of his thought, paired with Joshi’s Decline of the West, though both will be heavy going. Ideally, at some point we need an accessible H.P. Lovecraft’s Philosophy For Beginners book presented in the style of the leftist For Beginners series. Here’s a sample page from Linguistics for Beginners to show the approach I’m thinking of…

Having a cat as a narrator would probably be a useful conceit, since the text would need to draw the parallels between these philosophies and the natural bearing and attitude of cats.

Lovecraft also advises Epicureanism to young sceptics among his correspondents…

As to any especial “creed of speculative scepticism” … I would advise Epicureanism as a base. That old geezer had the right idea, and drew from the right sources, largely my old friend Democritus. Read Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura for the best possible exposition of this unsurpassed philosophy.