Some contemporaries I've read recently that I liked
The Road A Spot of Bother 1421 - The Year China Discovered America (<- this is actually pretty interesting, but its proposed theories are largely refuted in the academia)
If you want to try Lovecraft, start with the The Colour Out of Space or The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
If you don't like it you can give up with Lovecraft because all his books are quite the same. However if you like i can give you some advices about what to read next :p
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Pretty damn good book, just getting into it. But get the one translated by Mirra Ginsburg; supposedly, it's the best translation. The book before I read was The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa, very good read.
Seconding Foucault's Pendulum. It's like the The Da Vinci code, only that it's a smarter book, dealing with big ideas and that has multidimensional characters!
The Name of the Rose and Baudolino are also great Umberto Eco novels that I would recommend. He's an absolutely amazing author.