Monday, October 10th, 2011 - The Colour Out of Space

The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft

Published September 1927

Fractal by Ace of the Fungal Kingdom

Category: Cthulhu Mythos

I gotta post this quick as I'm way behind.

I loved this story.

A surveyor arrives in a small town in New England - they are going to turn the town into a reservoir - and he notices the earth and plants in the area are grey and dying. He makes some inquiries - as these guys always do - and hears rumors of something that happened so many years ago.

Seems a meteor landed on the farm of the Gardner family. It opens up and they find a ball inside that, after a strike with a hammer, disintegrates into the air. The meteor itself, which is a total mystery to the egghead college professors that check it out, fades to nothing in the coming days. That's when things start getting bad.

The Gardner family, along with a neighbor, Ammi, who is telling this tale to the surveyor, notice that the animals on the farm are sick, and the plants and crops are turning grey and brittle. This leads to these beautifully morbid descriptions of things decaying and dying, over the course of years, that is really unsettling, in part because of course we are next, right? We will all become brittle and old and grey someday and fade away. Maybe that was what he was after. I dunno. It's late.

But seriously this is considered one of his best stories and it really, really is great. Well worth your time.

Note:

While researching this story I looked it up on Wikipedia, to get a sense of where in Lovecraft's world this falls. There are no mentions of anything else in the Cthulhu Mythos in this story, though the colour gets mentioned in other stories, so it's part of the same world. And I also happened upon a real and sort of creepy thing on the Wikipedia page - impossible colors. It seems that there are colors that are impossible - like blue-yellow (that isn't green) or red-green (that isn't brown) - that scientists have tried to get people to see through experimentation. Weird stuff - and I love weird stuff.

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The edition I own is at right - the illustration is totally nutty and has nothing to do with the stories. It's signed "Rowena" - that's Rowena Morrill, a pretty accomplished illustrator it seems. The book also says "Preface For This Edition By Frank Belknap Long" YET NO PREFACE EXISTS! The colour got it!