Old Bugs

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"Old Bugs"
Author	H.P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story
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).

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 in fact a fellow student in Galpin's high school press club.^[1]

Reaction

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]

References

S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia.

Notes

↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Joshi and Schultz, p. 193.

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Old Bugs

v t e Works of H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle

Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow Over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time

Short stories	"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 Whisperer in Darkness" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"

Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "Poetry and the Gods" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Under the Pyramids" "Two Black Bottles" "The Last Test" "The Curse of Yig" "The Electric Executioner" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Trap" "The Man of Stone" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Winged Death" "Out of the Aeons" "The Horror in the Burying-Ground" "The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast" "The Slaying of the Monster" "The Tree on the Hill" "The Battle that Ended the Century" "Till A’the Seas" "Collapsing Cosmoses" "The Challenge from Beyond" "The Disinterment" "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Night Ocean"

Juvenilia	"The Little Glass Bottle" "The Secret Cave" "The Mystery of the Grave-Yard" "The Mysterious Ship" "The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist"

See also "Fungi from Yuggoth" (poem) "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (essay) "The Thing in the Moonlight" (short story)

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