The story is told in a typical conceit -- as the sole survivor of an Antarctic expedition, the narrator is attempting to warn future explorers against disturbing what he and his companions had.
What Lovecraft is good at is building tension -- things start slowly for the expedition, with exploration and sample taking, until an isolated group makes a discovery "that will do for biology what the work of Einstein did for physics." This, of course, puts the expedition on the path to disaster. The isolated group goes incommunicado, and when a relief expedition arrives, they find the camp in disarray, the men and the dogs wildly slaughtered, and some specimens missing. It's implied, rather than outright stated, that these specimens had lain dormant, rather than dead, and had revived and perpetrated this.
What Lovecraft isn't great at is prose. There's a lot of repetition in terms of "we withheld these details from our reports, but now I must steel myself and reveal the truth," and "ill-prepared we were for dealing with things beyond our ken". It's effective, though, as repetition is a device of madmen, and Lovecraft's protagonists are having the limits of their sanity stretched.
The setting is almost a character in itself, in that Lovecraft spends an enormous amount of time describing the awful city of the creatures, and letting our protagonist read their murals and learn their history. It's very creepy, if a little convenient that a professor of geology is intimately familiar with the Necronomicon and other tropes of Lovecraft's universe.
I would recommend this -- it's not quite what I had expected, and reading works that Lovecraft has influenced makes this lose some of it's power, but it retains enough to remain fresh.
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