The narrator, having “secured some dreary and unprofitable magazine work” in the spring of 1923, finds himself in a run-down boarding-house whose landlady is a “slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero” and occupied generally by low-life except for one Dr. Muñoz, a cultivated and intelligent retired medical man who is continually experimenting with chemicals and in
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dulges in the eccentricity of keeping his room at a temperature of about 55° by means of an ammonia cooling system. Muñoz suffers from the effects of a horrible malady that struck him eighteen years ago. He is obliged to keep his room increasingly cooler, as low as 28°. When, in the heat of summer, his ammonia cooling system fails, the narrator undertakes a frantic effort to fix it, enlisting “a seedy-looking loafer” to keep the doctor supplied with the ice that he repeatedly demands in ever larger amounts. But it is to no avaiclass="underline" when the narrator returns from his quest for air-conditioner repairmen, he finds the boarding-house in turmoil; the loafer, faced with some nameless horror, had quickly abandoned his task of supplying ice. When the narrator enters Muñoz’s room, he sees a “kind of dark, slimy trail [that] led from the open bathroom to the hall door” and “ended unutterably.” In fact, Muñoz died eighteen years before and had kept himself functioning by artificial preservation.
There are several autobiographical touches in the story. The setting is the brownstone at 317 West 14th Street (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues) in Manhattan, occupied in August–October 1925 by George Kirk, both as a residence and as the site of his Chelsea Book Shop. HPL describes it in a letter: “It is a typical Victorian home of New York’s ‘Age of Innocence’, with tiled hall, carved marble mantels, vast pier glasses & mantel mirrors with massive gilt frames, incredibly high ceilings covered with stucco ornamentation, round arched doorways with elaborate rococo pediments, & all the other earmarks of New York’s age of vast wealth & impossible taste. Kirk’s rooms are the great groundfloor parlours, connected by an open arch, & having windows only in the front room. These two windows open to the south on 14th St., & have the disadvantage of admitting all the babel & clangour of that great crosstown thoroughfare with its teeming traffick & ceaseless street-cars” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, August 19–23, 1925; ms., JHL). Dr. Muñoz may have been suggested by HPL’s neighbor across the street, “the fairly celebrated Dr. Love, State Senator and sponsor of the famous ‘Clean Books bill’ at Albany…evidently immune or unconscious of the decay” (HPL to B.A.Dwyer, March 26, 1927; AHT). Even the ammonia cooling system has an autobiographical source. In August 1925 HPL’s aunt Lillian had told him of a visit to a theatre in Providence, to which he replied: “Glad you have kept up with the Albee Co., though surprised to hear that the theatre is hot. They have a fine ammonia cooling system installed, & if they do not use it it can only be through a niggardly sense of economy” (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, August 7, 1925; ms., JHL).
HPL stated that the inspiration for the tale was not, as one might expect, Poe’s “Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar” but Machen’s “Novel of the White Powder” (HPL to Henry Kuttner, July 29, 1936; Letters to Henry Kuttner[Necronomicon Press, 1990], p. 21), in which a hapless student unwittingly takes a drug that reduces him to “a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch.”
WTrejected “Cool Air” in March 1926, possibly because its gruesome conclusion would invite censorship, as in the case of “The Loved Dead.” It was one of eight stories that HPL submitted in late 1927 to the poor paying and shortlived Tales of Magic and Mystery;HPL received $18.50 for it.
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See Bert Atsma, “Living on Borrowed Time: A Biologist Looks at ‘M.Valdemar’ and ‘Cool Air,’” Crypt No. 4 (Eastertide 1981): 11–13; Will Murray, “A Note on ‘Cool Air,’” CryptNo. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 20–21.
Corey, Benijah.
In “The Silver Key,” the hired man of the young Randolph Carter’s Uncle Christopher. When Carter, having found the silver key, returns bodily to his childhood, “Benijy” chides “Randy” for being late for supper.
Corey, George.
In “The Dunwich Horror,” the owner of a farm near Cold Spring Glen. His wife is not named. His relationship to Wesley Corey, one of the party that exterminates Wilbur Whateley’s twin brother, is not specified.
Crane, [Harold] Hart (1899–1932).
American poet. HPL (through his friend Samuel Loveman) met Crane in Cleveland in August 1922 and saw him again in New York in 1924–26, when he was working on The Bridge(1930). HPL parodied Crane’s “Pastorale” ( Dial,October 1921) in “Plaster-All” (1922?; LSNo. 27 [Fall 1992]: 30–31), in which Crane is apparently the first-person narrator of the poem. Crane speaks of HPL in his letters, referring to him as “piping-voiced” and “that queer Lovecraft person.” HPL saw Crane one last time in late 1930, as the ravages of alcoholism were taking effect. HPL admired Crane’s poetry, despite its modernism: he referred to The Bridgeas “a thing of astonishing merit” ( SL3.152). See Thomas Horton, Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet(1937); Susan Jenkins Brown, Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932(1969); John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane(1969); Thomas S.W.Lewis, ed., Letters of Hart Crane and His Family(1974); Paul Mariani, The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane(1999); Steven J.Mariconda, “H.P.Lovecraft: Reluctant American Modernist,” LSNo. 42 (Summer 2001): 22–34.
Crawford, William L. (1911–1984).
Semi-professional publisher in Everett, Pa. In the fall of 1933, Crawford proposed to start a nonpaying weird magazine, Unusual Stories. For this he commissioned HPL’s autobiographical sketch “Some Notes on a Nonentity,” although it never ran in the magazine. Although he accepted HPL’s “Celephaïs” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” for Unusual Stories,neither appeared there; instead, they appeared in Crawford’s Marvel Tales(May 1934 and March-April 1935, respectively). Around July 1934 HPL wrote “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” for one of Crawford’s magazines, but the essay was published in the Californian(Winter 1935). In the spring of 1935 Crawford contemplated reviving the defunct Fantasy Fan,with HPL as editor; but the plan never materialized. He also thought of issuing either At the Mountains of Madnessor “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as a booklet, or both together in one volume; he considered submitting the latter story to Astounding Storiesafter hearing of the acceptance there of At the Mountains of Madnessand “The Shadow out of Time,” but it is not clear whether he did so. Then, in late 1935, he focused on the issuance of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as a book. The project came to fruition in November 1936 (although the copy