^ Everything liblarva said up there.
As for reading, it depends entirely on the feel you're going for in any particular game. I'd personally stay away from pulps unless I was after the quick, shallow feel of stories being churned out on a deadline to pay the author's rent (they're often over-stuffed, word-wise, to get an extra tin of beans' worth out of a description), but those might certainly work for a brief one-shot with a high post rate, or a story intended to feel pulpy. The idea is that you're training your brain to automatically fall into a word-rhythm that makes people feel "story now" and pay attention/look forward to narrative posts rather than "words to read before dice happen"; the intent of the suggestion wasn't to try and pastiche an author in particular, just get some free subconscious atmosphere alongside refreshed inspiration in your genre of choice.
OK...CoC and D&D are
extremely different animals and I don't want to be a distraction here/contradicting all the good DM tips with Keepering tips, so I'll just drag this link over:
https://thealexandrian.net/wor...e-sandy-petersen-way ...and add commentary that CoC actually works best - unlike D&D - if the unseelie (dangerous to humans) nature of cosmic entities isn't something you could point at and go "evil!": rather just an existence so alien it interacts with the rules of the known world like vitriol interacts with flesh.
Relatedly, whilst there're some entities for whom the "madness rays" model of SAN loss is appropriate, I prefer estimating SAN loss in terms of the isolating effects of trauma, like...you can
tell someone "I was in a car crash" or "A living thing like a massive jellyfish stuck in a barrel attacked me" and they might intellectually understand you've had kind of a bad time, but the experience is so far from human daily normal they can't actually
relate to that sudden terror/processing failure of being there at the time (and if physical injuries aren't visible, they might deny it ever happened and treat you badly as a "liar" or "exaggerating"...or send you off to the asylum).
Lastly, this'll go for any game, but you can ask your players if they'd like you to roll passive checks for them if it's not vitally important, e.g. a Spot/Listen to see if they pick up extra clues, forewarning of an ambush being set up at a distance, that kind of thing. Also, remember it's your game! So long as you're upfront and consistent with rulings and pick your players sensibly - say your comfort zone is 6, it's better to accept 7 (or even 5 and go fishing for another at the next jumping-on point) than to grab an 8th that's a horribly bad fit for your party/setting/playstyle; tailor your RTJ questions to get the kind of players you want and be as specific as possible in ads.