Cool Air (1926), The Descendant (1926)

Cool Air (1926) Yet another nameless narrator, as it was often customary for Lovecraft, begins by stating he is afraid of cold. It all began, when he moved into a boarding house, where he introduced himself to an older doctor living upstairs from him after he saw something wet dripping through the ceiling. They were chemicals of dr Muñoz, now retired, who has lived alone in his room for decades. He's been forced to spend his life in a cooled down environment because of his mysterious illness. 

The two men become friends, as the narrator finds the retired doctor stimulating conversationalist. He also begins running odd jobs for him. Muñoz's health begins to deteriorate and with that, he begins cooling his rooms further and further. He soon goes to sub-zero temperatures until the cooling pumps break down on one hot day.

Frantically the narrator begins to look for replacement parts. In the meantime, the good doctor has to submerge himself into ice. Alas, the narrator is too late to find the parts and when he returns, he finds Muñoz's rotting corpse from the apartment. There are documents in the apartment stating, Muñoz was actually undead and had been keeping his body intact for a long time by using coolants. In time, his decaying body needed cooler environments and when the equipment finally broke down, it didn't take long for his body to instantly decay.

Cool Air is among the stories unhappy Lovecraft wrote during his stay in New York. While his other stories from this period are less than stellar, Cool Air is actually a solid story. Some of his critics state it as his best with the New York setting and it's hard to disagree with that assessment. It flows well and has a decent payoff despite being a tad predictable. As a story, it is surprisingly disinterested in the actual horror of Muñoz's actual state. After the machine breaks, Lovecraft is more interested in narrating the haste and panic of the narrator trying to help his friend, unknowing the real state of matters. Most of the macabre reveal is left for the final stretches and comes out surprisingly less melodramatic than in some of his other stories. 

Cool Air is one of those Lovecraft stories that has been adapted several times. There are a couple of direct horror comic adaptations of it and Alan Moore used it in his Lovecraft inspired comic Providence. 2007 horror movie Chill is a loose adaptation of it as is horror shlock maestro Albert Pyun's Cool Air. Other TV adaptations of it exist as well.

It's easy to see why Cool Air has gained so many adaptations. It does have a solid premise and the idea of the man cheating death by using machines the freeze his apartment is interesting. I wouldn't really classify it as horror though, as it does read more like a mystery story. Well worth a read.

The Descendant (1926) A story fragment Lovecraft wrote probably around 1926 or 1927. The collection I have slated it to 1926, but other sources claim 1927. The story begins with the narrator on his death bed, waiting for the inevitable. He begins to tell the story of a man, who lives in an inn in London. He is thought to be mad, as he screams when church bells toll. While he looks old and frail, people who knew him, say he is much younger. What had happened to him, he spoke not until the night young Williams bought him the Necronomicon written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. 

The book loosens the tongue of Lord Northam, the mad old man. But by this point, the story fragment soon comes to halt as Lovecraft never finished it. Had it been completed, it would have most likely been a proper part of his Cthulhu mythos. Now, it's just a snippet that shows quite a bit of promise but didn't, for some reason, manage to get anywhere. 

As the story is what it is, I can't really recommend reading it if you are merely casually reading Lovecraft. For those, who want to dwell deeper into his works, it is an interesting read, as the premise is quite interesting and there definitely was potential in it.