Awesome / The Shadow Over Innsmouth

• On the very first page, we learn that the narrator's pleas to the government got the entire town of Innsmouth raided by policemen, most of the citizens arrested, several buildings either burned down or blown up with dynamite, and Devil Reef bombarded with depth charges and torpedoes. Repeat: Regular policemen, in the 1920s—decades before the first S.W.A.T. teams—managed to lock-up a whole town of insane Half-Human Hybrid cultists and thwart an invasion by their Deep One masters, all while making it seem (to the public) like a routine Prohibition-era crackdown. It's strongly implied that they had military assistance (which the torpedo-equipped deep sea submarine pretty much makes explicit), but this is still an entirely mundane force against alien monstrosities.
• The sequence where protagonist himself escapes from the Gilman House and then the town. Both for the resourcefulness he displays, and for Lovecraft as a writer, showing that he could pen a gripping action sequence if he put his mind to it.

---