Innsmouth Book Club
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Innsmouth Book Club
IBC128 Cool Air
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With Innsmouth in the grip of a heatwave, we seek refuge in the shadowy library and take a look at Cool Air, one of HPL's three New York tales. We talk Walter Gibson, HPL in exile, adaptations, the HP1 unit, plumbers, Lovecraft in Gotham, and pose the question Sonia Greene and Aleister Crowley, true or false?
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Welcome to Insmouth Stranger.
SPEAKER_00Greetings, folks, and welcome to episode 128 of the Innsmouth Book Club Podcast. As you can see, in a change to our programmed itinerary, we have brought you directly to the cool of Innsmouth Library, where we're gonna shelter from the heat. I'm one of your hosts, Tim Mendies.
SPEAKER_02And I'm the other one, Rob Poyton. Yes, we were due to have a visit from an esteemed guest today, but uh it was coming in by train, and the excessive heat has actually caused the railway tracks to buckle just outside of Arkham. So unfortunately, he's stuck in Arkham and can't get into Innsmouth today. Luckily for us, of course, we're on Mr. Sargent's bus, and you can always rely on old Joe to make the bus go, right? Uh generally speaking, most of the time. Most of the time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, phew, what a what a swelterer.
SPEAKER_00Yes, indeed. What a scorcher. Yes. What a scorcher. Yes, so because it's so damned scorching, we we thought we'd try and trick our brains into feeling a little less sweaty and oppressed by by the temperature by reading HP Lovecraft's cool air, something we desperately want right now.
SPEAKER_02Most appropriate. Actually, there is one place in Innsmouth that is cooler than the library. It's the walk-in freezer in the kitchen of the ship inn. But I don't really think anyone wants to go in there, do they? Not really, no, not really. Who knows what gruesome delights they have hanging up on the hooks. Anyway, before we get into that, just a couple of news items about the Innsmouth Literary Festival 26 coming up on the 19th of September. As you may have seen on the socials recently, we can announce that guest of honour Stephen Jones will be signing copies of the newly released reprint of Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth and also the Shadow Over Innsmouth as well. This is part of that three-volume collection of Innsmouth stories that I think we both regard as the best Lovecrafting anthology out there.
SPEAKER_00Oh, definitely, they're definitely up there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And as well as that, we're delighted to announce that Phantasmagoria magazine will be launching an Innsmouth special edition at ILF as well. And in fact, editor Trevor Kennedy is going to be popping into Innsmouth for a chat in the very near future.
SPEAKER_00Excellent stuff.
SPEAKER_02And I believe you have some news about Innsmouth after dark, sir.
SPEAKER_00I do. I do indeed. Yes. It is sorted. We have our acts confirmed. It wouldn't be Innsmouth after dark without CJ Hooper, would it? Absolutely. It wouldn't be, you know, without our Eldritch Master of Ceremonies, uh, doing some comparing and also treating us to some of his improv poetry. Always an absolute pleasure. Uh, we're going to be joined by Malcolms, who will be reading a story. He's an audiobook narrator. He was at our first Is with After Dark. Um, but we don't know what he's doing yet. He's still um he's still deciding on that at this very moment. And yes, our headline act is going to be High Reciprocity, which is described as the rarest of things, a solo project of Simon Satori Hendley from the goth band Rome Burns, who's a poet and vocalist telling tales and singing songs of folklore, witchcraft, ghosts, severed limbs, kangaroos, and ducks. Marvelous. Serious dark folk has never seemed so silly. Whimsical poetry has never been so scary. So, yes, I'm looking forward to that immensely.
SPEAKER_02Marvelous. And our venue this year is gonna be the North End Club, which is just on the edge of the town centre. Of course, we'll get full details of that out as well. And might I say, one thing that also excites me as well, we're gonna have a meat raffle. Yes, I'll say no more about that.
SPEAKER_00We're going for the full Lovecraftian Phoenix Knights experience this year always.
SPEAKER_02It is, it is, yeah. Sort of Royston Vasey meets Phoenix Knights in Innsmouth.
SPEAKER_00Love it, love it.
SPEAKER_02Okay, let's cool things down a little then. Uh you just turn that fan this way, please, and uh let's make a start on cool air. And uh this is Lovecraft in his New York period, I believe.
SPEAKER_00Indeed, yeah, it was completed in March 1926 when, like you said, it was during his what he called his New York exile. Yeah, it's believed that the building the story's main setting is based on is a townhouse at 317 West 14th Street, where George Cook, one of Lovecraft's few New York friends, lived briefly in 1925. So there you go.
SPEAKER_02Ah, and and these are those old classic what they're called brownstone buildings, aren't they? Which are sort of quintessential New York with the steps and and all that kind of stuff going up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, though the stoop, I think they call it over there, don't they? The those steps, they call them stoops, I think.
SPEAKER_02Uh leading down to the to the sidewalk.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Yeah, yeah. Well, Lovecraft submitted it to his regular outlet, Weird Tales, where it was quickly rejected by Farnsworth Wright. So, yeah, we have a very short excerpt of a letter that Lovecraft wrote to B.A. Dwyer on March the 26th, 1927, when Lovecraft said that he found it inexplicable since it would appear to be just the sort of safe Macabre tale that he liked. And postulated that it was possible, Wright feared that its gruesome conclusion would invite censorship. So there you go.
SPEAKER_02I'm with HPO on this one, I have to say. I would have thought this was a perfect fit for weird tales. It's not an overly long story, it's weird as you can get it, but it's um and this is almost a hundred years after Poe and Valdemar, right? Which no doubt we'll mention. So how it could be seen as possibly too gruesome baffles me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I have no idea. I have no idea, but it it's it's Farnsworth right all over again, isn't it? So Cool Air was first published in the March 1928 issue of Tales of Magic and Mystery, which I'm not wasn't familiar with. No. Tales of Magic and Mystery was a short-lived pulp magazine that published only five issues between December 27 between December 1927 and April 1928. So yeah, it was around for about five months. That's pretty much it. It was edited by Walter Gibson, who was a writer and professional magician, who was best known for his work on the pulp character, The Shadow. Oh wow, that's a that's a well-known character, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Gibson wrote 282 of the original 325 shadow novels and novellas. He wrote them under the name Maxwell Grant, and apparently to meet deadlines, he had to write at least 10,000 words a day.
SPEAKER_0210,000 a day.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Wow. Bloody hell. Dangon's balls. I know, right? 10,000 a day. I wasn't lucky to do 10,000 a month at the moment. Yeah, it's mad, innit?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that was really surprising. So he was also a ghostwriter for Harry Houdini.
SPEAKER_02Ah.
SPEAKER_00And ghost wrote most of Houdini's books.
SPEAKER_02Wow. Is is this where that connection was born? Indeed it is.
SPEAKER_00Indeed it is. It is believed that uh it is believed that the Houdini connection was why Lovecraft was included in one of the magazines.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's cool. That's cool.
SPEAKER_00So there you go. The the magazine was basically it does what it says on the tin. It was stories involving magic and mystery. You know, uh a lot of it tended to be more factual about magic, and I think that's what turned a lot of people off. It was a lot more uh dry than fantastical. Um that's yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right, so yeah, let less of the Clark Ashton Smith kind of thing, or more sort of uh Yeah, yeah, but there you go.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because of its short-lived nature and the fact that it didn't sell all too well, these issues of this magazine, especially the one containing Kool-Air, are unicorn shit, let's say. I was gonna say I was gonna say hens teeth.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, there you go. They're they're rare as rockin' or shit, and uh yeah, go for a pretty penny on eBay.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's not a one that I was familiar with, I have to say. But uh I I guess with such a a short period of time it was out, then it makes you wonder how many other magazines like this there were around, didn't you? That if if they didn't have a Lovecraft in or something, then they just vanished into obscurity.
SPEAKER_00Oh well, I have I have stumbled across a couple, like a couple of the ones that um Lovecraft's Fungi from Yogath appeared in, sonnets, and a couple of things that Clark Ash and Smith's appeared in. It's like I've never heard of it before or since, and then when you look into it, it's like yeah, they they put out like three issues and then went under, kind of thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So we've referenced Lovecraft's exile in New York or New York exile as it's become known. Now, this in one sense kind of paradoxically was maybe Lovecraft's happiest time, but also his least happy time, because of course he moved to New York and married Sonia Green in March 24 and married in Brooklyn.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Unfortunately, after uh a short time, Sonia's hat shop went bankrupt, so she lost her job. She underwent a period of ill health, and eventually she had to move to Cleveland to get a traveling sales job, which meant she was only back in New York maybe one or two days a month. So it was just her income coming in. Lovecraft was really struggling at this point, and famously, of course, refused to get a proper job, which, you know, I I kind of admire in in one sense.
SPEAKER_00So do I.
SPEAKER_02But it did mean that he was forced to downsize and he ended up moving to an apartment at 169 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights, which was a tiny cheap place by all accounts, and he was relying on Sonia's income to pay the rent, pretty much pay the rent and not much else. Because we have in a letter from Lovecraft that at one point he was so poor he survived for three days on one loaf, one tin of beans, and some cheese. So pretty dire circumstances.
SPEAKER_00Bloody hell.
SPEAKER_02Just to compound the situation, in May of 2025, his apartment was burgled as well. Now, you kind of I mean it's a horrible thing, right, to happen to anyone. And you kind of think now was I wonder what they took. He he couldn't have had very much in there. No, probably some of his like beloved fountain pens, yeah. And you're kind of wondering now if there are any manuscripts laying around. Oh yeah. I mean, that's quite a grotesque thing to say, perhaps. But I mean, it would have been just dumped, wouldn't it? Anything like that.
SPEAKER_00Of course, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Now, on the brighter side, uh, as you might remember, if you listen to our dreamer on the night side episode with Frank Belknap Long writing mostly about Lovecraft's time in New York, he did have quite a good circle of friends there in the shape of the Kalen Club, uh, George Kirk, we've already mentioned, and he did spend a lot of time, seems to he seems to enjoy wandering around the bookstores, the museums, and looking at the architecture, the Georgian architecture, particularly in Greenwich Village, I think. However, the flip side of that, of course, is especially in some of the writings for this time, is we see Lovecraft that is most racist, I think. Yes. And it is opinion of many of his fellow New Yorkers was well, totally derogatory, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He wrote five stories while he was in New York. Three of them are New York stories or in New York settings. The horror of Red Hook. He and Call Air was the third. While in New York, he also wrote The Shunned House and In the Vault. He returned to Providence in April 1926, although he did go back to New York now and again to visit friends. So he he didn't completely detach himself from the city. But I I certainly think that the whole combination of events with him and Sonia, the pecuniary depletion, and just that feeling of being absent from his beloved Providence really uh gave him a rough time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's widely regarded as he was pretty uh much at a low ebb at this whole point. But it's interesting you mentioned uh Frank Balnablong, and obviously we mentioned the house of Mr. Kirk, but it's also believed that the setup of this is based on Frank Balnablong. Ah, yes, the heart, the heart trouble. The heart, the heart trouble, but yeah, because that's why he had to get was it medicine he was studying or something? I think so, yeah. He was studying something and he had to give it up because of a heart condition.
SPEAKER_02He had a heart condition, yeah. Though uh ironically enough, he outlived everyone pretty much, didn't he?
SPEAKER_00He did, yeah. Yeah, that is ironic actually. Uh, and also the other inspiration is Lovecraft's aversion to the cold.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes. It kind of makes his trips to Florida that more understandable. It does, doesn't it? You always think of uh I know it's the stereotype, stuffy New Englander recluse, out sunning himself in Florida, feeding chickens to alligators at the alligator farm and having a whale of a time. No, you know, but obviously the climate there, he felt suited him much better.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, because he caused him physical pain, didn't it? Like extreme cold or something. He had that that condition where he he really felt it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, which New England winters were much like old England winters. The other story is we just briefly alluded to already, that was said to be an influence on this was the facts in the case of Monsieur Valdemar by Poe from 1843, I think it was. Uh 1845, sorry, which in brief is the story of a man who's put into a hypnotic trance at the moment of his death or just prior to his death, and when he comes out of that sometime later, well, it is pretty much the same ending as here, isn't it? And I never knew until looking at this today that when that was first published, 1845, people thought it was a true story.
SPEAKER_00Ah, yes, yeah. I think I did read that. Yeah, I have read that somewhere before. I can imagine people getting really kind of freaked out by that concept, couldn't you?
SPEAKER_02Because this was uh Mesma was around at that time, I guess, isn't it? That that was all the the talk of the day.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, interesting.
SPEAKER_02And we're also going to be talking about adaptations today, and I I can't let this one go past without mentioning Tales of Terror, which features the Valdemar story. It's a Roger Coleman Poe. Uh I think there's three stories in there, and of course it's Vincent Price. I mean, you can't go wrong.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Yeah, there's another really weird, tenuous Poe link later, which we'll get to when we get to the uh adaptations, but um, yeah, uh another inspiration was believed to be Macken's novel of the white powder. That's what Lovecraft said he was most inspired by, which he can yeah, because it is the the bodily dissolution that that white powder which basically melts people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I love I love that story.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I wonder if any of those influenced the very much later and kind of be movie-ish, but one of my favorites, the incredible melting man, by the way. Maybe, yeah, which we must cover at some point if we can find a copy of it.
SPEAKER_00I've got a copy of it somewhere, I can send you that. That's not a problem. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's uh aka a goth in the current weather.
SPEAKER_00Oh god, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the novel of the white powder was released as part of one of my favourite books of all time, Macken's The Three Imposters. So there we go.
SPEAKER_02So let's move into the story itself. We're in New York, of course, and I think it's pretty fair to say that the the protagonist is Lovecraft himself, by and large. Yes. And it starts like this. You ask me to explain why I'm 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 odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of my peculiarity. I think the nice thing with this, we we get in the next paragraph that this horror is not associated with darkness, silence, and solitude. In other words, this is not your classic gothic horror story or ghost tell, but we're in the clangor of a metropolis, uh the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming house in New York in the spring of 1923. So we see Lovecraft breaking with tradition here already and moving from those gothic trappings right into the modern day.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I've looked we go straight into the sort of autobiographical in the next very next paragraph, don't we? I had secured some dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York, and being unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings, and very reasonable price. That's exactly what we just talked about. His time in New York, isn't it? It's yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Yes, the search continues to this day, doesn't it, when you're renting for my God. I I I rented for a a while once and absolutely hated it, but I had a pretty shit land all to be fair, you know.
SPEAKER_00Oh well, I when I first moved to Brighton, I've lived in two, three, four, five, seven different places before I ended up where I am now. Wow. Wow. It's just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_02And of course this is Lovecraft, so we do get a an element of the architectural. We get these two descriptions here, one of the place and one of one of the people in it, and well, the description of the person is less flattering, to say the least. But we start with this. The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, fitted with woodwork and marble, whose stained and solid splendour argued a descent from high levels of tasteful opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and decorated with impossible paper and ridiculously ornate stucco cornyces, there lingered a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery. I love that phrase, a hint of obscure cookery. You you know that, don't you?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's what you were talking about earlier, wouldn't you said you when you went into an establishment in Bedford and you smelled beer and cook cooking fat.
SPEAKER_02There you go. It's strangely comforting. And we are in Manhattan here, which was in its day quite an upmarket area. I mean, I'm I'm sure it still is now, but it was uh certainly well, we're talking about late 1840s here in that Victorian area, it was quite well to do, and also became the centre of music venues and vaudeville theatres and that kind of thing. So I'm guessing in the 1920s this was a quite lively place that was a little bit down on its luck, perhaps. It was on the downward sort of slope, but that uh a quite lively place, a lot was going on there. Yeah, and then we get this description of the landlady, and we start to see the distasteful aspects of Lovecraft's views coming out a little bit more there. You know, he talks of people being just a little above the coarsest and crudest grade. It's not just a racial thing, it's very much a class thing with Lovecraft as well, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, very much so. Yeah. I like this final line when it in this description, because he's talked about that that his landlady didn't really bother him with gossip or anything like that, kind of kept to herself, kind of thing. Only the din of streetcars in the Through Fair Below proved a serious annoyance. We've all been there, right? These days it's that beep, beep, this vehicle is reversing at like five in the fucking morning.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, I know. But in a way, that's quite evocative. That sort of uh I'm thinking of those old noir films where you're in the detective's office and you've got that outside hum of traffic with occasional beep beep kind of going on, you know. I like the ones where you get the train track.
SPEAKER_00Oh yes, for those proper noir things, right?
SPEAKER_02The distant train whistle. That's like in Innsmouth, it's the distant tolling of the bell, right?
SPEAKER_00Oh yes.
SPEAKER_02Don't ask for whom.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Whom Dagon's bell tolls.
SPEAKER_02Yes, that's someone else going in the freezer we mentioned earlier, I think. So three weeks he's been there when the first odd incident occurs. One evening at about eight, I heard a spattering on the floor and became suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent odour of ammonia for some time. So something starts dripping through the ceiling, always uh a potential issue when you're in flats, I guess. Yeah. And uh it goes to the landlady to ask to tell her what's happening, and we we get this we get this paragraph written phonetically of a sort of cod Spanish accent, which I'm not even gonna go into. No, he was impenetrable, awful. I mean, Mr James did this and it wasn't good with Mr James. Lovecraft doesn't fare any better.
SPEAKER_00But then he does it a lot with his yokels as well, doesn't he? Oh, oh, I can't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02But the gist of it is she mentions uh Dr. Munoz, who has special chemicals, who's uh uh uh an ill man, he's very sick, and he takes these funny smelling baths, and he sort of keeps himself up in his room, he never goes out. Uh, my boy Esteban takes him up his food and laundry and medicines and chemicals. But yeah, she's uh she's not a nosy landlady, as we've already established, but this is a little bit of an odd tenant she's got here.
SPEAKER_00She's pretty on it though, because she trots off up the stairs and whatever she says to the doctor, the the dripping stops. So at least she's on it. Because I mean, have it like I said, I've lived in a lot of rented accommodation. It's like your light fitting suddenly stops working, you phone the landlord, you might get it fixed uh some point before Christmas.
SPEAKER_02Yes, well, going back to my own experiences that yeah, I'd oh well, all sorts of stuff going on, but oh god, yeah, they're happy to take 600 quid a month off of you, but you know, yeah, but when it comes to actually fixing something, it's like pulling teeth. Yeah, I thought there were two things here that are quite ironic, or one is certainly ironic, because our protagonist, our unnamed protagonist, by the way, he kind of okay, that's going on, or that's uh a bit strange, but he doesn't really think much more of it. But what he does say is he wondered whether this obstinate refusal of outside aid were not the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. Now, coming in the light of Lovecraft sort of walking around New York trying to avoid other people of certain characteristics, and here he is talking about baseless eccentricity. There's a certain irony in that, isn't there?
SPEAKER_00There is, yeah, you're right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but then he also says there is, I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person who has come down in the world. Well, that's totally autobiographical, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then we get that heart attack that we mentioned before because everything's going okay. He would never have known Dr. Moonz had it not been for the heart attack that suddenly sees me as I sat writing in my room. And basically he drags himself up the stairs. The guy's Doctor Moonnoz, right? So, you know, it makes sense. Drags himself up the stairs and knocks feebly at the door above mine. My knock was answered in good English by a curious voice some distance to the right, asking my name and business. And these things being stated, there came an opening of the door next to the one I had sought. Just reading that, an opening of the door next to the one I had sought. So is this like a sort of double apartment thing or something, do you think? Ah, maybe. Yeah. Because it mentions about going into a large apartment uh with rich and tasteful decoration, and we get into the details. We've got a couch, mahogany furniture, hangings, old paintings. Uh all bespoke a gentleman's study rather than a boarding house. And I now saw that the hall room above mine, the little room of bottles and machines, which Mrs. Herrero had mentioned, was merely the laboratory of the doctor, and that his main living quarters lay in a spacious adjoining room, whose convenient alcoves, a larger, contiguous bathroom, permitted him to hide all dresses and obtrusive utilitarian devices. That's a very lengthy sentence.
SPEAKER_00I was gonna stop panting for breath at the end of it. That's love craft for you, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02I need to I need to lay down for a bit now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I like that. The this contiguous bathroom permitting to hide all dressers on obtrusively utilitarian devices like the toilet. I like the fact he didn't mention the toilet.
SPEAKER_02Of course, yeah. I I was thinking his washing machine is tumble dryer, dishwasher.
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, no, he's on about the shitter.
SPEAKER_02Oh my words, Mr. Lovecraft, really, really. Um, but he's somewhat reassured as Lovecraft would be himself, because this is obviously a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination. Isn't it funny? Discrimination has those two meanings. Yes. Yeah. And they both apply.
SPEAKER_01Indeed, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So we've got Dr. Moonot, and again, it is a bit relentless, this kind of uh being of good blood and breeding here, because we get a hybrid face of masterful though not arrogant expression, adorned by a short iron grey full beard, and an old fashioned pince, shielded the full dark eyes, and surmounted an aquiline nose which gave a moorish touch to the physiognomy, otherwise dominantly Celtiberian. And there it is again. The whole picture was one of striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding. Oh please, Howard, give it a rest.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it is very classist, isn't it? You know, I think people because obviously, with good reason, people bring up the race aspect. But it it is mostly informed by the class sort of thing, isn't it? A lot of his discrimination is rooted in that class thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the old gent, isn't it? The old uh, you know, the family down on their luck and all that kind of thing. Yeah. Which is kind of ironic in a way, because isn't that one of the big gothic tropes in itself? Yeah, ushers and all the rest, you know.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, of course it is. Yeah. Oh yeah. These once great families form falling into decay and ruin.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So he notices this room is somewhat cooler than usual. Uh and in fact, it's around 55 or 56 degrees Fahrenheit, which means absolutely nothing to me. No, same. So I looked it up, 13 degrees C, which is uh a sort of chilly autumn day in England, I guess. What we'd call crisp, probably.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it's what I call comfortable. It's what I kind of have my my rooms nothing, nothing above 15. Although me and my partner argue about the thermostat a lot because she's a bit like old HPL and can't do with cold. I can't do with heat. So we fight over the thermostat a lot.
SPEAKER_02I I feel and know your pain, sir. And just one bit of advice for anyone out there, any young people starting on their matrimonial journey or cohabitation for the first time, never ever, ever, regardless of who your partner is, say, Well, if you're cold, why don't you just put a jumper on? That's all I'm saying. Yeah. Doesn't end well.
SPEAKER_00No, it never ends well.
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, uh 13 degrees C that's probably like air conditioning sort of temperature, isn't it? What you'd have today.
SPEAKER_00Well, what essentially he's got is a proto-aircon unit. I guess it is, isn't it? This this device, it it's essentially HPL invented air conditioning. Yeah, it runs on diesel or something, doesn't it? I did actually find an amusing thing when I was I was typing into Google earlier, Cool Air HPL. There is an air conditioning unit unit called the Cool Air HP One.
SPEAKER_02Oh, whoa, we'll get one of those, the ILF now. We need to get a sponsorship deal sponsored by the HPR. Marvellous, marvelous. So obviously, he asks about this, and uh we start to get something of the backstory of the good doctor. And I thought what was interested here, because now he starts visiting the doctor regularly, and the the doctor opens up about his secret researches and almost ghastly results. And at one point, of course, we get it when he examines the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his shelves. Now we don't get the shopping list, we don't get any mentions of of any titles here, but I thought here it is again, that nice mixture of science and the supernatural. And is almost giving like a scientific explanation for why these things might work. It seems that he did not scorn the incantations of the medievalists, since he believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which might conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from which organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged doctor Torres of Valentia, who had shared his earlier experiments with him through the great illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders proceeded. So I suppose it's that thing when you get into that stage of having a very bad illness, you'll turn to anything in order to get some sort of relief or a cure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I like this sort of description uh here, because he's um he might, he half jestingly said, someday teach me to live or at least to possess some kind of conscious existence without any heart at all. Because obviously they're talking about his own recovery, and it's here that he sort of explains his own malady. In fact that's very much the word he uses. For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact regimen, which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if prolonged, affect him fatally, and the frigidity of his habitation, some fifty-five or fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit, was maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling with a gasoline engine pumps and all that kind of business. And then we get into all that like you were saying about the all this uh weird medieval literature. So keeping him alive, himself alive, is his life's work.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's this curious mixture of mechanical, medicinal, and psychological, because it it doesn't seem to be ascribing any supernatural uh cure or or um assistance from these books, but they they work on your nervous system. I guess like a sort of placebo effect kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. But it is sort of it does continue to sort of evolve, doesn't it? Because I like I like this bit here. He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and Egyptian incense till his room smelled like a vault of a sepultured pharaoh in the Valley of Kings, or Eddie Goth's flat.
SPEAKER_02I know, I like the sound of his apartment already, but you add in that lovely Egyptian incense. Yeah, sounds like a cool place to live. Cool place to live, sorry.
SPEAKER_00We accidental pun.
SPEAKER_02Accidental, I know, I can't can't do help myself. Yeah, and and the reference to ancient Egypt, of course. I mean, you've got to have that in there, haven't you, in all of these stories.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02But despite all this, it seems like the doctor is deteriorating and the temperature is getting lower and lower, as low as 38 or 40, and finally even 28. The bathroom and laboratory, of course, being less chilled in order that water might not freeze. Now, 28 Fahrenheit is minus two, so yeah, yeah, we're talking cold now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Or is it uh you know, we're we're talking uh up your way a balmy summer's night.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And in fact, the the tenant of joining him is complaining about the icy air from around the connecting door, so he helps the doctor fit heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty. A kind of growing horror of outre and morbid caste seemed to possess him. He talks of death incessantly, but laughed hollowly when such things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently suggested. So this guy, the the part of the horror is he knows what's coming, he knows exactly what his end is gonna be. And um, it's a little bit like, Well, I won't need a coffin, just uh just a shovel and a bucket will do.
SPEAKER_00Mopping a bucket.
SPEAKER_02But in his gratitude for helping him out, well, potentially saving his life, I guess. Before he continues to help the doctor, he he cleans for him, muffled in a heavy ulster. Always like the use of ulster in that context. It's quite uh quite Holmes, I think that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Although I thought I believe Holmes's was an Inverness.
SPEAKER_02Ah, right, yes.
SPEAKER_00That was an Inverness cape with Holmes, I'm pretty sure. Because I've I've researched that when I was doing a pastiche.
SPEAKER_02And the chemicals are getting stronger, the spices and incense are getting stronger. He's now taking incessant baths in these pungent chemicals, which he insists on taking unaided. So there's another little sort of clue there as to what's going on. And Mrs. Herrero pretty much gives up. She won't even let her son now run errands for him. And if he suggests other physicians, the sufferer would fly into as much of a rage as he seemed to dare to entertain. He evidently feared the physical effect of violent emotion, yet his will and driving force waxed rather than waned. Because we have had this discussion earlier about this will to live. It doesn't matter if you haven't got a heart, if you've got the willpower, you can live through it. And he's writing furiously, right? Is is like he's gathering all his notes together and writing his findings down, uh, presumably to pass on to someone. Well, doesn't he give instructions that these these are to be sent to another doctor?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, one celebrated French physician who was now generally thought dead. So he's writing to this doctor who's already dead. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02And this is this is quite grim as well, I thought. The protagonist burns all those papers anyway, undelivered and unopened, because they contain inconceivable things. But talking about the doctor again, his aspect and voice became utterly frightful, his presence almost unbearable. One September day, an unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had come to repair his electric desk lamp. Which is, you know, bloody hell. What on earth does he look like?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and again, especially when you couple this in. That man, oddly enough, had been through the terrors of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough. So yeah, he must have been a hell of a fright.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, that's uh we can only wonder or or try and imagine or dare to imagine. Then comes the end, the almost inevitable end, I suppose, where when in the middle of October, so it's almost a Halloween story, one night about eleven, the pump of the refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the process of ammonia calling became impossible. And we get this quiet frenetic sequence where Munoz is banging on the floor and is scurrying about trying to fix the machine, rushing out to get ice. Uh, when one place sells out of ice, he has to go somewhere else, and is really up against the clock.
SPEAKER_00One thing I like about this is it's a testament to Lovecraft's skill of how he structure stories in the atmosphere because you get these long, ponderous paragraphs about what's been going on, and with a lot of crammed with detail, to the point that it keeps talking about the temperature and things like that. So that's in your head. So a simple line, one night about 11, the pump of the refrigerating machine broke down. That's the sort of line that isn't supposed to make you go, oh shit, but it does.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a good point, actually. Yeah, it's the implication, isn't it? Indeed, yeah. Which fits into a lot of the Lovecraftian horror, doesn't it? It's uh it's not so much what you've seen, but what it means that is the horror.
SPEAKER_00Especially as because in normal circumstances, one night the fridge broke down isn't the sort of is the sort of thing that would usually accompany, oh for Christ's sake, I'd better phone an engineer or we're well we've we've had it here.
SPEAKER_02We're we have our our our tool freezer, the you know, the body-sized one, um, that packed up. We've had it for about 10 years and that packed up. Uh luckily we have a small chest freezer, so everything can go in there. And we we just had a new one delivered the other day. But um, yeah, it's uh a commonplace domestic occurrence, isn't it? The washing machine is broken, the freezer's broken. Indeed. Uh yeah, it's not life or death for us, but for the doctor. For the doctor, yeah, yeah. And I like this as well. So it it is trying to get someone to fix the machine, is trying to get ice and all the rest of it. Finally, I hired a seedy looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner of 8th Avenue. I love that. A seedy-looking loafer. I know. You're gonna trust this guy with the doctor's life. And it's like it sounds like he's um bugged him a few dollars and said, make sure the guy upstairs just keep taking ice up to him, and he's off looking for a pump piston and workmen to install it.
SPEAKER_00I like how that's a sort of a trope in New York set stories. Somebody's moving into a new apartment, so they'll just randomly hire some guys that are loafing around on the corner drinking a bottle of 40 out of a brown paper bag to help them carry the sofa the stairs, right? You want I should carry a sofa? Yeah, exactly. It's it's such a trope in all of them like cagney and all that kind of stuff, right?
SPEAKER_02Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but he does manage eventually to source uh a pump and a couple of workmen. Now, anyone who's tried to get a plumber, or as I had a little while ago, tried to get one particular part for a leaking bath, which led to me going to one particular DIY outlet and actually growling at the salesman.
SPEAKER_00Nice. That sounds about right. That sounds like my experience in these things as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was end of tether time, and you know, we we nearly went beyond that, but the uh the manager stepped in and calmed things down, you know. When you got water pissing out over your floor and you've got to turn everything off, and the last thing you need is someone going, oh well, yeah, you know, that's not what you need. Anyway, my my problems were nothing compared to the doctor. So he gets back to the house, he's got the pump, he's got the workman, and the place is in utter turmoil. Above the chatter of odd voices, I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads of their rosaries as they caught the odour from beneath the doctor's closed door. The lounger I had hired had fled screaming a mad night not long after his second delivery of ice, perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. Well, there we go. There's that curiosity again.
SPEAKER_00Curiosity didn't so much kill the cat as frighten a loafer. There we go.
SPEAKER_02There was no now here's there you go, we've got this again, right? There was no sound within save a nameless sort of slow, thick up dripping.
SPEAKER_00Nice. Yes. Azip adipos your seepage, I believe, is the is the uh correct terminology.
SPEAKER_02There's a there's a actor's name. And uh Mrs. Herrero picks the lock, basically, which I thought was a nice little touch.
SPEAKER_00I like to think that she did it with a hat pin or a haircut, you know, a hairpin. She took out the phone. She took it out of the button. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Now, nose is protected by handkerchiefs. We tremblingly invaded the accursed south room, which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon. Now normally warm sun of an early afternoon would be quite a quite a nice thing, wouldn't it?
SPEAKER_00You'd think.
SPEAKER_02Bathed in sunlight. Yeah, it's nice and warm. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well not when you encounter something like this. A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated. Something was scrawled there in pencil in an awful blind hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very claws that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch and ended unutterably.
SPEAKER_02Yes, so the clues are building up and it's nice because it's not a big jump scare reveal. Like open the door, oh there it is, it's this gradual increase, isn't it, in wrongness, which is the the classic Jamesian thing again. It starts off okay and gradually gets wronger and wrong and wrong.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that the fact that he's leaving a big old slimy trail like a giant slug is way creepier than just going, oh a corpse.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes. Well we're back to that um uh mezzo tint kind of. We we have to. We're contractually obliged. Lovely. What was or had been on the couch I cannot and dare not say here, but this is what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickerly smeared paper before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp. The end ran that noisome scroll, is here. No more ice. The man looked and ran away, warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you know what I said about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was good theory, but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He couldn't stand what he had to do. He had to get me in a strange dark place when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never would work again. It had to be done my way. Artificial preservation. For you see, I died that time eighteen years ago. Bum bum bum.
SPEAKER_00Lovely stuff.
SPEAKER_02It is very effective, isn't it? It's very nicely done. And it is that classic Lovecraft ending of it's tapping at the window, it's ah but you know, I I think it works. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh, but back to old Chime sleepiness again. That was him, wasn't it? With the it's tapping at the window thing.
SPEAKER_02And I suppose, in a sense, this guy is a doctor. Um, scientist is going to be taking notes of his progress and what's happening. So it seems fitting in with the story as well. And I don't know, with right and that possible is it too gruesome, it's not overly graphic. There is one little bit earlier where he covers his eyes and he never sees his eyes again. Next time he sees him, he's put a bandage round his eyes. There's an implication his eyes have just jellied away.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah. Melted. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But there's nothing in there that is overly graphic, is there? It's the implication again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's one of those stories that hinges on the implication rather than the explicit.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and those uh issues aside that we've you know we we mentioned before, and are always going to be in Lovecraft to some extent or another, certainly at this period in his writing, a very nice, effective weird tale. Why that would not be considered for weird tales, I don't know. But we have this this discussion a lot on Strange Shadows, where some of the greatest Smith stories are turned down by Riot for being what was it? I think they were too weird, weren't they? Some of them, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh, there was yeah, there was a couple that were too weird, and a lot of them because there's not enough action. Maybe that's the issue with this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but again, his he's working. Lovecraft doesn't do action, does he?
SPEAKER_00Really? So no, except Shadow Over Innsmouth, really, and Reanimator.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So it is it is a is an odd one. But it did see light of day, so we're grateful for that. Uh and it is because I was going through my volumes here, it is actually quite hard to see in most of the Lovecraft's collections I've got, the anthologies. In fact, the one I found it in eventually was Pants of Horror, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, which was first published in 1964, and I've got the 1973 reprint here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I'm going from the same thing, but the Wordsmouth editions, because there was the there were four four volumes, this was the fourth of, and it's it's a much slimmer volume than a lot of the rest of them because it's a lot of his very short stuff, you know, things like memory, uh, behind the wall of sleep, the white ship, the temple, the tree, things like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, because the other ones, obviously, you've got the ones, it's all the his ghost-written ones, that's the horror in the museum, and you've got the whisper in darkness and the Haughtner of the Dock.
SPEAKER_02Right, right. I wonder if it's because it's not a mythos story, you know, and it's the mythos story that tends to get all the attention.
SPEAKER_00I would assume so, and I think it's again, I think his length might be part of that. I mean, it is included in the Necronomicon, the big old hardback. It's not sort of relegated to the Eldritch Tales one, the companion one. Um, but yeah, I think that may be it, it may be the lack of mythos. But if you if you sort of scratch the surface, you could it you could trick yourself into believing it was, because you have the mention of the mouldering old tomes and the Egyptian stuff. It's like it doesn't take a giant leap to imagine some kind of you know, bit of the alaz if creeping in there, you know.
SPEAKER_02Oh, totally. And if you just if you just uh reference on our Sprecklick and Colton or the the Necronomic or whatever, yeah, it would have fit perfectly, wouldn't it? Um maybe in his mind he wasn't tying it into his yogsothery. I I don't know. This this was a more Poesque or Mackinesque story, but then we see a big Mackin influence in the Dalitch horror, don't we? So that doesn't really fit.
SPEAKER_00Which makes it doubly interesting because it's definitely got to be one of the most adapted. I think that's because of the simplicity of its setup. I mean, certainly when you look at film, because there's there's more than what I've already got. There's shorts, which like independent film short things like that. But in terms of major adaptations, I have five here to look at. So we're gonna go in chronological order and we're gonna go all the way back to 1971 to one of our favourite TV shows of all time, Night Gallery. The episode aired on December the 8th, 1971, and it was part basically was one of those where there's three stories in the episode, and this is where I mentioned earlier we're gonna get another Poe thing, because this one was Cool Air, obviously Lovecraft, Camera Obscura, which was Basil Copper, and a story called Quoth the Raven, which features Edgar Allan Poe having writer's block.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it it's it's it's interesting, isn't it? Um but the if uh if you've seen the adaptation of Cool Air on this, it is different because the the main character is a woman and there's a man who lives in in the refrigerated apartment and it's turned into a gothic love story. A sort of doomed love story kind of thing.
SPEAKER_02I think I have seen that one. I think I have seen that. I'm I'm I'll have a check around and see if it's uh up on YouTube if I can find it, or it's certainly probably on streaming somewhere, I think.
SPEAKER_00I think it is on YouTube, because I I've got a rip of it. I've definitely got a rip of it somewhere, and I think I got it off YouTube. So yeah. But yeah, the fact that there's a Basil Copper story in there as well, I thought was uh cool. Yeah, very interesting. Our next adaptation, we jump ahead to 1993 to an absolute, in my opinion, some absolute class here. We go to the anthology film Necronomicon, you know, Brian Usner. Uh yeah, the brilliant stuff. Jeffrey Coombs says Lovecraft. Indeed, yes, in the in the library, the framing story, yeah, yeah. That's so that's brilliant, yeah. So it's Jeffrey Coombs in that. And yes, in this, you've got the drowned based on the rats in the walls, whispers based on whisper and darkness, and of course the cold based on cool air. What's cool about this is that our doctor, the doomed doctor, is played by David Warner.
SPEAKER_02Ah, yes, of course. Yes, I remember now. Yeah, yeah. Wasn't he a marvellous actor? He's in so many good things.
SPEAKER_00Oh huge fan of David Warner, uh, huge fan. Like ever since ever since I saw him, do you remember him as the as the the loopy sea captain and hornblower? Yes, yes, yes oh, what a what a performance that was. That was bloody brilliant.
SPEAKER_02And I just think he spans from like the Time Bandits to Cross of Iron. Oh, yeah, on the Eastern Front. I mean, it's yeah, great actor.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so then this is you know, this turns him more into a serial killer kind of thing, um, which we'll see again in another one. So it's nowhere near a straight adaptation this time around. But I I like it for what it is. Interestingly, as well, that the it scored this segment scored by Daniel Lischt, who went on to score Silent Hill Downpour. So there you go. There's another interesting bit of uh trivia for you that nobody else is gonna care about, but there you go. Some on me, someone will yeah, me, me alone. Now we're gonna get probably into the best known one now, which is 1999's Cool Air, which is the one that was released as part of the HP Lovecraft collection on those wonderful DVDs. In fact, it was number one, it's the one that's in black and white. Right. I think this is probably the best uh and most and most faithful adaptation. Uh the only real difference is that the uh the the protagonist has a name in this one, Randolph Carter.
SPEAKER_02Oh yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Randolph in his name, which you know that works nicely for me. I can live with that, I can go for that.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Yeah. Uh Jack Donner as Dr. Moonwas, who is he's another one of those really old actors who've cropped up in everything. It was actually filmed on location in Glendale, California. Just a bit does I don't know why that struck me as amusing, but it just did for some reason.
SPEAKER_02Uh literally is as as opposite as you can get from New York. Well, yeah, exactly. I think that's it, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Something I always come back to. That that adaptation of Crouch End, which oh god, which was filmed in probably the most un-London-like location ever.
SPEAKER_02It was Australia, I think. No, Canada.
SPEAKER_00It's Canada.
SPEAKER_02Oh, Canada is Canada, but we like those sort of wooden wooden buildings, and and that's the shame because part of the mystique of Crouch End is the hilly winding streets and the particular kind of red brick houses you have there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, now it is kind of a bit weird and uncanny valley in places. Yeah. Yeah, so there you go. That that I would say is probably the best of the adaptations. Now, the next one is one I have seen, but I can't really remember for some reason, so it can't be great. Uh, but it comes from 2006, it's called Cool Air, as you would imagine. And this is one that again flips it. The the bloke who moves in, it's actually a woman called Shockner who's cooling herself down, and obviously they have uh you know a bit of an rumpy kind of relationship going on, or at least brewing, you know. Yeah, I don't I have seen it, and I but I can't remember a lot about it.
SPEAKER_02But there you go, that's another one that's uh I think I'm probably the same because I I probably would have watched it because that is HP Lovecraft's core air, I think it's very blatant on a thing. So I I doubtless would have watched it in some time, but yeah, I've no memory of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, because he again it it's it does follow the plot. This guy called Baxter has a heart attack, staggers up to see the doctor for treatment, passes out, awakens. And yeah, the the doctor, a strangely preserved woman named Chockner, persuades him to stay until he recovers fully. There you go. And um, yeah, called him Dark Arts. And it's yeah, basically follows it, it just flips the gender of the main character. Well, the doomed character. Okay, so finally we're going to what is both the worsted adaptation, in my opinion, and one that I absolutely love. It's one of those so bad it's brilliant. Uh, we're going to 2007 to a film called Chill, which turns cool air into a splatter gore slasher film. Which stars Ashley Lawrence from Hellraiser. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's oh it's on my budget. It's it's really bad. Basically, the there's the doc the Dr. Moon Ross lives upstairs, lives in refrigerating conditions, a guy moves in, but he's getting a bloke, a killer, to go out and kidnap people and carve them up and replace his dying flesh with new flesh and and all that kind of thing. Yeah, it is it's it's one of like I say, schlock is the best way I can put it. But I I enjoy it for what it is, but it's so it's so low budget, and really apart from Ashley Lawrence, the acting is dreadful, but it's well worth it. Yeah, I would say it's uh an eight or nine pinter. If you remember my scale.
SPEAKER_02Oh, nice, brilliant. Is it like those um high flyer films? We we're flicking through for something to watch, and they bloody pull you in those things because they've always got a great title and a nice graphic. I think one was like um the the last homes versus the vampire, and you think, oh, oh, homes and vampires in London, and then High Flyer comes up at the start, and you think, Oh god, a bloke in a rubber suit, and someone puffing some dry ice around, and someone going, Oh, hey, yes, there he is.
SPEAKER_00I put in the same bracket as things like call girl of Cthulhu, you know, it's sort of that kind of level of thing. Uh, I like this. There's a little thing on the Wikipedia here from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, which summarizes the plot as let's just say someone dies but cheats death by harvesting flesh and dabbling in the occult. That's pretty much a good sum up of it. But one thing I do find interesting is that in this it does mention the Necronomicon. Yeah, yeah, it actually does get that in, which uh I quite like. Now, I'm just gonna end this little bit here because Rob can see this, but obviously you guys at home can't. I have the DVD in my in my hands. He has. Oh no, yeah. The tagline finds them, freeze them, skin them. I wonder where that was going. That's why I paused dramatically. Let your brain fill in the gap.
SPEAKER_02In and of itself, that's not a bad plot hook, is it? It's a little bit corny, I guess, but you know, you could do something with that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, exactly. But uh it in this uh you know they put like quotes from some kind of obscure magazine on the front. Yeah, but this is from slasherpool.com. Never uh in Liverpool, do you think? I wonder. I don't know. Slasherpool. Saw meets Nosferatu.
SPEAKER_02Now that sounds good, but no, it isn't, yeah. You couldn't get any further away from that. The trouble is with that sort of quote, is the full quote might be this film thinks it saw the meets Nosferatu, but it really isn't. And of course you just crop out a bit, didn't you?
SPEAKER_00Now, what will strike you as entertaining on the back here, you've got two little awards things. It won World Fest International Festival, winner of best special effects, and Worldfest International Festival winner, best achievement in fantasy horror. Okay. There you go. There you go. Fair enough. Someone liked it. So exactly. So it's not just me. No, seriously, it's terrible, but I love it.
SPEAKER_02And a film might have good effects, but still be a terrible film, right? You know, we can think of a few uh well, more than a few films that are totally computer CGI ed, whatever, and look amazing. But well, the the Doctor Strange one, I think we've mentioned before, which has all sorts of stuff going on, including a sort of Cthulhuid entity at one point. Oh, yeah. Looks amazing, can't remember a thing about it. Absolutely, in one in one eye and out the other, you know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. Now, this I would I would put in the same sort of bracket. Do you remember the toolbox murders? That does ring a bell. Yeah, it's kind of feels like that. It's really harking back to that late 70s, early 80s Driller Killer. Drilla Killer, that kind of California axe massacre, all that kind of shite, right? Which I love. I love all that crap.
SPEAKER_02And uh yeah, I mean, as we said there, easy one, or certainly easier for film TV adaptation. Uh again, that's uh potential. Well, I suppose it's not a ghost story, is it? The the supernatural element is there, potentially. I mean, you could make more of that, but it's certainly not full-on, like a Jamesian type story, is it? No. Now, if we move away from TV and film to the graphic, there are two adaptations that I know of, and indeed I have both of these. The first was first published in issue 62 of Eerie magazine, that great old horror comic. And the artist was Bernie Wrightson, one of my favourite graphic artists up there with uh Barry Windsor Smith and everything else. Bernie Wrightson did an incredible collection of Frankenstein pictures some years back that are just amazingly detailed.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, I had that, it was reprinted a number of times. So I don't know if the copy I've got is a reprint or if it's the uh the original, but that one is well worth looking out for. Now, the other one is not so much an adaptation uh as a sort of homage, I suppose. This is DC Comics in the Batman, the Doom That Came to Gotham series. Oh yes. And we have uh Mr. Freeze in that, who I remember, didn't Arnie play him in the film or something.
SPEAKER_00Arnie played Mr. Freeze, yeah, gosh.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but anyway, my least favourite Batman film, probably that one. But the Mr. Freeze in this version is much more like Dr. Moon's, much closer in concept to that character. So, of course, you know, we know they draw on Arkham and all the rest of it. So, more than a little sideways nod to Lovecraft in that one, I think.
SPEAKER_00Didn't Alan Moore have a nod to it in Neonomicon?
SPEAKER_02Oh, Providence, yes, the first picture of Providence, yeah, which we really must look at sometime as well. I think the difficulty now is is getting holds of copies of it that don't cost 60 quid an ish. God, yeah. Didn't they do a big compendium? Um I'm sure there must be, but I was having a look around a little while ago, so I was speaking to uh Helena Nash about it at um Chaosumcon. We were chatting about that. If we do find it, we'll get Helena on. She had Some uh some interesting stories about Alan Moore. So, yeah, if anyone out there would like to donate a copy of that to Innsmouth Library, then do get in touch. We'd be very grateful.
SPEAKER_00And as we've mentioned Alan Moore, I have to quote Pop Belete itself. Alan Moore knows the score.
SPEAKER_02He certainly does. He certainly does. So I think we'll just finish today with just uh a mention of a book that I had not seen before, even though I think it's it's been out for a couple of years, 2023, and uh as I was researching for today, I I came across this. It's a book called Midnight Rambles by H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, written by David J. Goodwin. And it's a beautifully crafted new study of three crucial years in Lovecraft's life, 1924, 25, and 26. It delves into how his particular authorial vision and life experience were shaped by his only long foray outside his native Providence, Rhode Island. So this is kind of a detailed look at Lovecraft's time in New York. Uh we've already mentioned some of the uh major incidents there. But it goes a little deeper into that and and talks about Lovecraft viewing the city through the lens of nostalgia for an imaginary past of Dutch burgers and refined Englishmen. And obviously, there's uh a lot in there about Lovecraft's marriage to Sonia Green as well. And one other thing that I did see, it wasn't in this, but it was somewhere else, was there was a claim going around that I think it was in 1918, Crowley was in New York and he met and dated Sonia Green for a time. Uh as it turned out, when I did some more investigation, it's what well, I believe the technical term is bollocks.
SPEAKER_00I was gonna say that sounds like bollocks to me.
SPEAKER_02I believe the true technical term is absolute bollocks, and to be fair, the guy who put that out did say yeah, it was absolute bollocks. He he was writing something about uh I think it was something on the Necronomicon or something like that. So there's there's no evidence at all that Sonia ever met Alistair or or anything like that. And as far as I know, even though they sort of overlap time-wise and geographically to an extent, I don't even know that Lovecraft and Crowley were aware of each other. Um I'm not even sure that was a thing.
SPEAKER_00I don't think he's he mentioned him anywhere. I'll have a look in then at some of the letters and see if he does ever mention him. But I don't recall seeing any mention of Crowley.
SPEAKER_02No, I'm I'm sure I'm sure I would have seen it if he had mentioned it, I would have seen it mentioned it somewhere, wouldn't we, in in all everything we've been looking through. Yeah. Yeah, that that was just an interesting little side thing that came up there.
SPEAKER_00That's interesting. I think it it's probably something similar. Like you get it with do you remember uh Lovecraft's book by Loophoff? Oh yeah, yeah. And obviously that was a fictionalized account of Lovecraft and all the rest of it. And and you'll see crop up, oh yes, well, he da-da-da-da-da. It's like, no, no, no, that's part of that came from that. That was fiction.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and there's one or two others. There's there's one where the three of them, right? The three amigos go on a sort of detective adventure. Yeah, uh the name escapes me at the moment. So, yeah, possibly that sort of thing feeds into the consciousness, does it, or the the bloody AI or whatever now, and then is regurgitated later on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, because I mean Lovecraft's been fictionalized a lot. I mean, I can think off the top of my head of several full-length novels where he's a character and umpteen short stories and several movies, you know.
SPEAKER_02Funnily enough, that was one thing that got me into looking at Crowley was uh Illuminata's trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Scheyer, where both Crowley and Lovecraft are characters.
SPEAKER_00Maybe that's where it originally comes from then.
SPEAKER_02Could be, could be from that as well. Yeah, but yeah, Midnight Rambles, HP Lovecraft and Gotham. I don't want to get a hold of a copy of that, it sounds very interesting. Does uh I wasn't aware of that, and I know we've covered Dreamer on the Night side, but this might give us some more detail and more history as well. So, yes, I shall have a read of that. And uh finally, I just wanted to finish with this. Two things really. In an unmailed letter found on his desk after his death, possibly his last piece of writing, Lovecraft referred to New York as the pest zone. So even to his dying day, he wasn't a fan. Although the pest zone, yeah, that's got a Stephen King film, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00I was gonna say that sounds like a Stephen King movie.
SPEAKER_02However, before that previously, in May 1936, in a letter to a New York friend poet Reinhard Kleiner, Lovecraft did write this. Age brings reminiscences. With all the drawbacks of one six nine Clinton Street, that era of nineteen twenty-five is not without its idyllic glamour. The long informal sessions of various rendezvous, the complete disregard of the clock, the quaint familiar landmarks, the spirited weekly meetings, the then burning issues with no less burning arguments, the bookshops and tours of exploration, surely they glow with a golden light in the perspective of eleven long years. That age was the last of youth for our generation, the last years in which we could feel the curious sense of the importance of things, and that vague, heartening spur of adventurous expectancy which distinguished the morning and noon from the afternoon of life. That's quite a poignant note, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Isn't it?
SPEAKER_02So there we go, dear friends and listeners. Thanks for joining us today in the relative coolness of the library. I think these fans are uh stirring in the air a little. I I don't think we're down to minus two quiet. I'm not even sure that we're down to 13 or 15, but you know, it's a little cooler than outside. And as the alternative is either the freezer at the ship in or a dip into the sea, then well, I know which one I'm choosing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Do let us know, of course, any thoughts you've got on cool air and those adaptations, anything you think that we uh missed out. I I again I think for me, one of the standouts for this is that putting a horror story, slap bang in the middle of a 20th century city, and that mix of mechanical and supernatural or psychological. A very interesting step from Lovecraft. What have we got coming up next time, sir? I believe next time we're going to be doing a bonus episode. And I believe we don't know what it is yet, but we're gonna decide on something. Not yet. We're always open to suggestions, especially from patrons. And of course, uh, if any of the patrons want to join us for a chat, then do drop us a line and let us know. We'd be delighted to have you on the show.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if you have you wanna you have a subject you want to discuss with a couple of men in Tweed, then uh yeah, that might be an interesting way of doing it, you know.
SPEAKER_02It's way too hot for Tweed. Oh yeah. Unless you were going open crotch tweed. Tweed undercrackers, yeah. Tweed budgie smugglers, there you go. Oh, there's there's a disturbing image, isn't it? And we will be delving into the mailbag in our next regular episode as well, because that's starting to uh swell a little alarmingly. Perhaps it's just the heat, but uh it is quietly swelling in the corner. It's not so much the swelling, it's the pulsating that freaks me out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Oulations.
SPEAKER_02You keep your oliations to yourselves. Nice. All right, thanks again for joining us, folks. As always, do keep those comments and questions and suggestions coming in via YouTube, via the Innsmouth Forum, or on our Patreon page where you can also sign up to support the show. Thanks to everyone who signed up just recently as well. If you'd like to join them, you get access to bonus content for Strange Shadows and the Innsmouth Book Club. You get your quarterly PDF of Innsmouth News and free entry, of course, to events such as the forthcoming Innsmouth Literary Festival in Oddly Moist Bedford. Actually, Oddly Moist would be quite nice at the moment. I'd settle for that, wouldn't you?
SPEAKER_00It would, yeah, it would. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02On that slightly squelchy note, it's goodbye for me, Rob Poynton.
SPEAKER_00And it's goodbye for me, Tim Mendies.