Cool air

by H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft

"Cool Air" by H. P. Lovecraft is a short story written in March 1926. A narrator recounts why cool air has become detestable to him, beginning with his arrival in a New York City brownstone in 1923. After suffering a heart attack, he meets his upstairs neighbor, Dr. Muñoz, a brilliant but reclusive physician obsessed with defying death. The doctor's apartment is kept freezing cold through an elaborate refrigeration system. As their friendship deepens, the narrator witnesses increasingly strange behavior—until the night the cooling system fails catastrophically.