The theme of Lovecraft’s New York story “Cool Air” was strong prompted by his own fear of cold and need for heat, and by his friend Leeds’s precursor story. But I wonder if the following historical snippet might be relevant to the slight stress that Lovecraft places on the increasing demands of Dr. Munoz for more cold and ever more ice…

At the peak of the trade in the 1870s, cargoes of New England ice worth hundreds of thousands of dollars went south annually from Charleston to Calcutta … ice was cut in winter [for export around the world] on every pond and river in the region” (from Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England, University Press of New England, 2000)

So could there be a slight touch of historical satire in “Cool Air”, only to be picked up on by those aware of the role of the ice trade in New England history? I hasten to add that I’m not the first to make a suggestion along these lines, as S.T. Joshi has pointed to the possibility of a few deftly humorous touches in the story…

“There is, to be sure, a perhaps deliberate undercurrent of the comic in the whole story, especially when Munoz, now holed up in a bathtub full of ice, cries through his bathroom door, “More—more!” (A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft)

A Lovecraft envelope, postmark 9th June 1934, with a note to Clark Ashton Smith on the back…

Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] wishes you would fcall [phone? call / tell?] him as much as possible about H2UICQU01QMN2HAH [Hziulquoigmnzhah], the paternal uncle of Tsathoggua – cf. “Door to Saturn”.

My guess would be that this might relate to tweaking Smith’s “Door to Saturn” (pub. Jan 1932) before a reprint, so as to align it with the emerging Tsathoggua aspect of the mythos…

I have done what I could toward elucidating the genealogy of Tsathoggua, and am sending Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] the result of my delvings into the Parchments of Pnom, the chief Hyperborean authority on such matters. Pnom [R.E. Howard?] has much more to say about Tsathoggua than about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth; but no doubt you have access to other records, mainly concerning these entities; and I’d be glad of more specific information about them. As I am pointing out to Ar-Ech-Bei, Pnom’s account of Ts. can be reconciled with the legendry told to Zamarcona in ‘The Mound.’ The myth, through aeons, was varied in the usual mythopoeic fashion by the cavern-dwellers, who came at last to believe that merely the images of Tsathoggua, and not the god himself, had emerged in former cycles from the inner gulf. Ts., travelling fourth-dimensionally from Saturn, first entered the Earth through the lightless abyss of N’kai; and, not unnaturally, the Yothians regarded N’kai as his place of origin. Undoubtedly the god now resides in N’kai, to which he returned when the ice overwhelmed Hyperborea.” (thanks to Will Murray for the 1934 Lovecraft to Smith letter extract)

An interesting insight into the care Lovecraft took, in co-ordinating the merging of the emerging mythos.