Lovecraft at Age Six! The Little Glass Bottle

I know I said I was caught up with my YouTube posts, but I was looking through my notes and I did miss a couple, so I'll try putting up those posts around one a week until I finish them.

This one is my reading and reaction to what might be the earliest example of Lovecraft's fiction: a tiny little short story (we would call it "flash fiction" today) that he wrote at the age of six!

A Fun Little Lovecraftian Diversion

One day, I was looking through my old Lovecraft collection, looking for a short story that might be fun to read on YouTube, when I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole.

See, I was trying to figure out which of his stories were the oldest, and what I stumbled onto was something uncharacteristically... cute? For a Lovecraft.

It turns out that Lovecraft's earliest extant writing is a little piece of fiction that he wrote when he was five or six years old.

You can find the images here, in young Lovecraft's own handwriting: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:425207/

So, I thought it would be fun to read this little piece of history aloud, and talk a little about it, too. Unlike the works that made him famous, this one is playful and funny.

A Reading of my Favorite Lovecraft Short: "Cool Air"

Trying to catch up my blog here with my YouTube shenanigans...

Just a reading of my favorite Lovecraft short, Cool Air. I love this story because, in contrast to a lot of Lovecraft's writings, there is no cosmic horror, no twisting dreamscape, and no ancient evil. That uniqueness is what really makes me love this story.

What the Heck Is a Crookes Tube? (Lovecraft story talk)

Image of Crookes tube in operation, from D-Kuru, CC BY-SA 2.0 AT, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn't know until yesterday that August 20th was H. P. Lovecraft's birthday! It seemed like a worthy time to go through a couple of his stories, so I read two of them last night: Under the Pyramids (written with Harry Houdini, of all people), and The Shunned House.

"Four large Dornier aëroplanes..."

Photo by Clemens Vasters from Viersen, Germany, Germany, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 Just a little fun thing: I'm re-reading Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness because (I think) Justin and I are going to talk about it on our next episode of The Wordy Pair.

I guess I haven't mentioned our little podcast on this blog yet, have I? Oh well, there it is! It's funny and goofy and we talk a lot about writing and great stories.

Anyway, right at the beginning of Lovecraft's story, he mentions the airplanes they use in the story with the words that make up the title of this post.