An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

its time, and held that place with ease through the period of seven or eight years during which it made occasional pronouncements. Its critical pronouncements were relished by some and resented by others, but there was no doubt of the respect in which they were held by all” (“Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” Californian5, No. 1 [Summer 1937]: 5). But HPL’s contributions to the issues of 1915–19 are on the whole dogmatic, narrow, and intolerant; he was taken heavily to task for his reactionary racial and literary views by such amateurs as Charles D.Isaacson and James F.Morton. The last two issues reveal a significant broadening of intellectual horizons and a more sophisticated appreciation of cultural change, and thereby foreshadow the development of HPL’s aesthetic and moral thought in his last decade.

Cook, W[illiam] Paul (1881–1948).

Printer, publisher, and amateur press editor residing in Athol, Mass.; he published under the pseudonym Willis Tete Crossman. Cook served as Official Editor (1918–19) and President of the NAPA (1919–20); he was also appointed Official Editor of the UAPA in 1907, but resigned before the end of his term. He edited and published several amateur magazines, including The Monadnock Monthly, The Vagrant, The Recluse,and The Ghost. He met HPL in 1917 through amateur journalism, Cook agreeing to print HPL’s Conservative . His encouragement was instrumental in HPL’s resumption of fiction writing in 1917. Cook wrote a brief article, “Howard P. Lovecraft’s Fiction” ( The Vagrant,November 1919) as a preface to “Dagon”—the first critical article on HPL’s stories. He published many of HPL’s early weird tales and poems in The Vagrant . In late 1925 he enlisted HPL to write “Supernatural Horror in Literature” for The Recluse(1927); in 1928 he printed HPL’s story “The Shunned House” (rejected by Farnsworth Wright for WT) as a small book; his subsequent financial and nervous breakdown, brought on by the death of his wife in 1930, prevented the binding of the book. A small number of sheets of the 300-copy edition were bound by R.H.Barlow; the remainder were bound by Arkham House in 1959–61. In visiting Cook at his home in Athol in the summer of 1928, HPL absorbed many details of local history and lore reflected in his fiction, notably “The Dunwich Horror.” In 1940, Cook wrote In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft(Driftwind Press, 1941), which he typeset himself; it is still perhaps the best memoir of HPL. His “A Plea for Lovecraft” ( The Ghost,May 1945) warned against a distorted image of HPL beginning to emerge, largely because of the publications from Arkham House.

See R. Alain Everts, “The Man Who Was W.Paul Cook,” Nyctalops3, No. 2 (March 1981): 10–12. “Cool Air.”

Short story (3,440 words); written probably in February 1926. First published in Tales of Magic and Mystery(March 1928); rpt. WT(September 1939); first collected in O;corrected text in DH; annotated version in An2and CC

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 avail: 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.