Old Bugs

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Sheehan's Pool Room is the lowest dive in Chicago's stockyard district. Illegal whiskey flows there, and lost souls come to forget. Its most pitiful regular is Old Bugs, a filthy, trembling wreck of a man who sweeps the floors and begs for drinks. Yet his speech is strangely refined, and he keeps a faded photograph of a beautiful woman.

One night, a well-dressed young man walks in, eager to taste liquor for the very first time. Old Bugs cannot bear what he sees, and the secret of who he once was is about to come out.

Written in 1919, Old Bugs is one of H.P. Lovecraft's most unusual stories. It is a dark, tragic satire of the Prohibition era about alcoholism, ruin and a past that cannot be escaped. It is a rare side of the master of weird fiction that few readers know.

© 2026 Gates of Imagination (Audiobook): 9798182648189

Release date

Audiobook: 22 September 2026