With this tale of horror set in 1923 New York City, H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) touches on two subjects that, judging from the proliferation of films and novels spotlighting these peculiar topics, have continually aroused our human imagination: cryonics and zombies.

I say ‘touches on’ since Cool Air is neither a story of low-temperature preservation for the sake of future resuscitation nor is it about voiceless, emotionless blank-faced corpses brought back to life, however, quite strangely and quizzically, what happens is a close fictional cousin to both.

The tale begins when our young narrator takes up residence on the third floor in a four-story brownstone on West 14th Street in downtown Manhattan and tells us, “You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a bad odor.”

As it turns out, the tenor of the entire story unfolds not within an atmosphere we customarily find in horror stories, an ambiance of darkness, silence and isolation but revolves around feelings of cold and smells that disgust during the midday and evening hours in the middle of a bustling city.

All goes well at the apartment for our gentlemanly, well educated, well-bred, well-mannered narrator until one evening he hears a dripping coming from the apartment above as he becomes simultaneously aware of the stench of ammonia. He summons his Hispanic landlady who explains how there is a Dr. Muñoz with his special equipment up on the fourth floor, a Dr. Muñoz who is an accomplished physician, a physician who, through the goodness of his heart, gave emergency care to a workman injured completing a job at the apartment. She then hurries up the steps to deal with this issue.

Days pass and one afternoon the narrator suffers one of his recurrent heart attacks, an attack where he needs the intervention of a doctor; he then recollects the landlady’s words and makes his way as quickly as possible to the fourth floor. When his knock is answered, we read: “Nevertheless, as I saw Dr. Muñoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which nothing in his aspect could justify.”

And this is only the beginning – the narrator has further reflections during his initial encounter leading to future meetings and dealing with the good doctor.

Rather than noting and commenting on the subsequent eerie happenings of this Lovecraft tale, permit me to offer a few reflections on the two topics I cited above: cryonics and zombies:

Firstly, pertaining to cryonics, there is an actual Cryonics Institute founded in the United States in 1976, about 50 years after the author penned this tale, an institute that continues to conduct research in effectively freezing people for years and then unthawing them so they can take advantage of future medical breakthroughs. What appears as a subject for science fiction and horror stories one day can becomes technological and scientific reality another day.

Moving on to zombies, is there anything more alarming than the living dead walking around serving an evil leader, confronting, harassing, haunting, or even attacking innocent men and women and children? I recall watching those old black-and-white films made back in the 1940s and 1950s with zombies at the command of some demonic mastermind, usually marching in pairs, mentally and emotionally zoned-out, usually in dark underground passages,. Those un-dead beings created from the remains of corpses really gave me the creeps.

Such was the climate within the publishing world, when H.P. Lovecraft submitted Cool Air to the pulp magazine Weird Tales where his tales were regularly accepted, the head editor rejected his work. In its own way, an unthinkable thumbs-down since Lovecraft was one of the prime contributors to the magazine. However, in this instance, the head editor feared a tale with such a gruesome, shocking, hideous, ghastly and otherwise grisly ending would provoke the censors to forbid the magazine to continue.

Of course, what people find acceptable or unacceptable changes with the times, but it is well to keep in mind how positively shocking Cool Air was to readers when first published in 1928.

Available on-line: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ca.aspx