Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales. This is your host and storyteller, John Haggardorn. It's been a while since we did an

HP Lovecraft short story here, and I have a great one for you today called Cool Air.

It was written in March of 1926, so yes, it's in the public domain, and published in the March

1928 issue of Tales of Magic and Mystery.

In the story, the narrator offers a story to explain why a draft of cool air is the most detestable thing to him.

His tale begins in the spring of 1923 when he was looking for housing in New York City.

He finally settles in a converted brownstone on West 14th Street. Investigating a chemical

leak from the floor above, he discovers that the inhabitant directly overhead is a strange,

old, and reclusive physician. One day the narrator suffers a heart attack, and remembering that

a doctor lives overhead, he climbs the stairs and meets

Dr. Munoz for the first time. I would say that's a good start to a short story, wouldn't you?

Lovecraft's inspiration? He wrote cool air during his unhappy stay in New York City,

during which he wrote three horror stories with a New York setting in Lovecraft's New York exile. David E.

Schultz cites the contrast Lovecraft felt between his apartment, crowned with relics of his

beloved New England, and the immigrant neighborhood of Red Hook near where he lived is an inspiration

for the unsettling juxtaposition of opposites that characterizes the short story.

Like the story's main character, Schultz suggests Lovecraft cut off from his native

Providence, Rhode Island, felt himself to be just going through the motions of life.

And we did do the horror of Red Hook, which I believe you'll find in our archives here,

and at 1001, Ghost Chiller, and Lovecraft Stories, one of our 12

podcasts. Cool Air's main library source is Edgar Allan Poe's, the facts in the case of M. Voldemar,

described as Lovecraft's favorite Poe story after the fall of the House of Usher.

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