Old Bugs

"Old Bugs"
Author	H.P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Published in	The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces
Publisher	Arkham House
Publication date	1959

"Old Bugs" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, probably written shortly before July 1919.[1] It was first published in the Arkham House book The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959).

Plot

Creation

The piece was written after Lovecraft's friend Alfred Galpin's suggestion that he wanted to try alcohol before Prohibition went into effect. In response, Lovecraft, a teetotaler, wrote a tale of an old derelict known as Old Bugs, who turns out to be Galpin himself, brought low by "evil habits, dating from a first drink taken years before in woodland seclusion." At the bottom of the manuscript, Lovecraft had written, "Now will you be good?"[1] The woman whose engagement to Old Bugs is canceled due to his drinking, Eleanor Wing, was a fellow student in Galpin's high school press club.[1]

Reception

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia says of the piece, "It is not nearly as ponderous as it sounds, and is in fact a little masterpiece of comic deflation and self-parody."[1]

gollark: I kind of prefer Purescript in some ways, lacking as it is the accumulated cruft of years of legacy and millions of language extensions.

gollark: haskell.haskell(haskell(haskell, haskell)(haskell))

gollark: why.wouldYou(want.that())

gollark: I bet there's an extension for it.

gollark: You can get pi *zeros* cheaply, at least, but micro-SD cards are annoying.

References

Joshi, S.T.; Schultz, David E. (2004). An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Hippocampus Press. p. 193. ISBN 978-0974878911.

External links

Old Bugs title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Works related to Old Bugs at Wikisource

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[Joshi-1] Joshi, S.T.; Schultz, David E. (2004). An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Hippocampus Press. p. 193. ISBN 978-0974878911.

H. P. Lovecraft
Bibliography
Short stories	"The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist" "The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"
Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time
Novels	The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "Poetry and the Gods" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" The Mound "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"
Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth
Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity
Locations	Arkham Dunwich Innsmouth Miskatonic University Lovecraft Country R'lyeh Yuggoth
Characters	Randolph Carter Herbert West
Books about	H. P. Lovecraft: A Life H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia Lovecraft: A Biography Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos
Related	Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle Lovecraftian horror Cosmicism H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society Necronomicon Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (documentary) Sonia Greene (wife)
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