"The Colour Out of Space" (H. P. Lovecraft) Reviewed
Dr Hermes
plotting or characterization, but the mood and atmosphere is so dense
that you'll get some on your hands and have to wipe the pages. It sure
shook me up. "The Colour Out of Space" was from all accounts Lovecraft's
personal favorite of his stories, the one that best conveyed his
attempts at presenting a horror from The Beyond that is literally
incomprehensible.
It's an interesting premise. Most literary monsters are basically people
or animals with (symbolic) scary masks on. Even the typical alien from
deep space you met in most science fiction is recognizably a person or
beast from our own world with some attributes cranked up or distorted
(tentacles, slime, antennae, you know). Lovecraft's own stories often
featured this effect; I thought Wilbur Whately would have been scarier
if his gruesome carcass was not described in such exact detail in "The
Dunwich Horror."
In "The Colour Out of Space", Lovecraft succeeds in the very difficult
task of presenting something that is so alien, so unlike anything we
know, that it's hard to visualize and yet it's a convincing threat. The
title itself tells you what a strange invader we're dealing with
here.... it's distinguished by a <b>color</b>. Not only that, it's a
color no one has ever seen before.
The story gets off to a strong start with some of Lovecraft's haunting
travelogue prose ("West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are
valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut."). Our narrator is a
surveyor checking out the area which will soon be flooded to create a
new reservoir. There is a blighted area where nothing can grow, which
worries him. After he talks with one of the locals and learns what
happened in that valley half a century earlier, the narrator gets a bad
case of the creeps. The man returns immediately to Boston to quit his
position. His only consolation is that at least that cursed area will be
safely covered with miles of deep water but even that has a sinister
implication - ".. and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water
of Arkham."
Okay, at this point I'm hooked and have no choice but to keep reading.
It develops that more than forty years earlier, a large meteorite
impacted near the well at the Nahum Gardner farm. Three professors from
Miskatonic University came out and were immediately intrigued and
baffled by the meteorite, which has visibly shrunk in a single day and
is so soft that "they gouged rather than chipped a specimen" for
examination.
All the standard tests prove useless as the strange rock doesn't react
to any number of chemical agent (Lovecraft goes into considerable detail
about the tests). Odder still, the darn stuff refuses to cool off and
definitely is shrinking. This is not normal behavior for a meteorite.
When the professors heat the substance for a spectral analysis, "it
displayed shining bands unlike any known colors in the normal spectrum."
What the heck? This "was almost impossible to describe, and it was only
by analogy that they called it colour at all." (If you can visualize
this, you have a more flexible imagination than mine.)
Well, the professors are stumped. They go back for more samples and find
the meteorite is rapidly vanishing. All their procedures don't produce
anything useful and soon there is nothing left to test or even any
material to prove that there was such a thing.
Ah, but back at the Gardner farm, things are beginning to gow wrong. The
entire crop that year is ruined; the pears and apples and tomatoes are
so bitter that one bite makes you sick. At time goes by, people notice
that animals and plants around the area are starting to look abnormal.
Even the distorted trees are said to be seen moving their branches when
there is no breeze to explain it. The unhealthy influence spreads and
soon it begins to affect the Gardners themselves. Something is sucking
life itself out of everything in the area. And what is going on with the
well? Insanity and illness will soon be the least of the family's
worries...
Yike. Part of the reason why this story seems so unsettling to me is
that the malignant influence gradually becomes more obvious and more
destructive, and no one has any idea what to do about it. It brings up
unpleasant connotations of all those fatal diseases which we inevitably
have to deal with in life. The way the livestock and people at some
point turn gray and brittle, literally falling apart while still alive
is something new; at least, the papers and cable news aren't alarming us
with reports of something like that just yet. ("Tonight at eleven...
have you been exposed to an unknown color?")
As dismal as the fate of the Gardner clan is, what's even worse is what
the narrator leaves mostly unspoken. The dead zone around the meteor
site was gradually expanding a wee bit at a time for the half century
since the incident. Nothing will grow there, people living nearby suffer
from bad dreams and general malaise. And now the entire area will be
flooded and the citizens of Arkham will drinking water from which this
unexplainable horror sits in the middle of. No, thank you! None of that
for me. The story is set in the then-present of 1927, so it can't
explain in itself all the weirdness already going on that area. (You
know, that unpleasantness in Dunwich, the Innsmouth problem, the
Witch-House, the shoggoths in the woodpile....) But even so, I wonder
what the inhabitants of Arkham are like today, assuming the city wasn't
destroyed in the years since.
The Colour Out of Space itself is one of the most enigmatic and
ambiguous threats in horror fiction. There's no confrontation scene
where villagers chase it with pitchforks and torches, nor a scene where
the virile young scientist discovers that high-pitched sound will
destroy it. For most of the story, it's not even clear that the damned
thing is alive or just some sort of toxin in the soil slowly mutating
everything above it. (The final fate of the Colour raises about as many
questions as it answers.)
Despite what Nahum Gardner thinks, I'm not sure that the
extraterrestrial visitor is "sucking the life" out of every human,
animal, insect and plant around. It might be just giving off some
chemical or radiation that is causing everything to deteriorate.
Everything is much simpler to cope with when aliens arrive as little
green men with big heads, as big reptile creatures or even shapeless
blobs. At least you can confront those things directly.
sco...@ij.net
ever happens.
always interesting to read your reviews.
sp
Charles Hargrove
read it once because I found it so unsettling. It also spawned a really
awful "sequel" "The Color Out of Time" by Michael Shea. The sequel was
cut from the Dereleth mode where people throw around Elder Signs and
make every thing better. But then there is hardly a shortage of bad
Lovecraft pastiches.
charles
Dr Hermes
It's funny that when I first read Lovecraft (at maybe ten or eleven,
when I read everything I could pin down in front of me), "The Colour Out
of Space" did not make much of an impression. A meteor causes people to
get sick and go crazy, then it's covered with water. Eh? No big thrill.
Other stories by this Lovecraft guy had giant green monsters with squid
faces, walking corpses or ghouls running around under cities.... much
more obvious and alluring horrors to my juvenile mind. It's only now,
with this recent re-reading, that I finally get the full impact of what
Lovecraft was saying. Great stuff. It's cheering to think I have so much
Lovecraft still to re-discover after all these years.
And I agree that Derleth's pastiches seriously missed the point, by
having the Great Old Ones diminished to the point where mortals can
handle them through rituals or talismans. Whether it's Sherlock Holmes,
Conan, Cthulhu or James Bond, I almost invariably find my only real
enjoyment in what the original creators wrote. (With a very few pleasant
exceptions.)
Joe Pfeiffer
>
> And I agree that Derleth's pastiches seriously missed the point, by
> having the Great Old Ones diminished to the point where mortals can
> handle them through rituals or talismans. Whether it's Sherlock Holmes,
> Conan, Cthulhu or James Bond, I almost invariably find my only real
> enjoyment in what the original creators wrote. (With a very few pleasant
> exceptions.)
Funny you'd mention that -- I really, really love Sherlock Holmes
stories (I've got Baring-Gould's "Annotated'... I've got Klinger's
"New Annotated"... I've got Redmond's "Handbook"...). But I've
gotten to where I just can't read pastiches at all. I haven't read
any of the post-Asimov "Foundation" stories...
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
Dave
Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
But I've
> gotten to where I just can't read pastiches at all. I haven't read
> any of the post-Asimov "Foundation" stories...
Ditto. I've notived this browsing the big-box-bookstores. There is
now more post-Asimov FOUNDATION than original, same with Herbert and
DUNE, and we're seeing the"Nine Billion Co-Authors of Arthur C.
Clarke". Is suppose we should be thankful to the Heinlein estate for
protecting us Spider Robinson's "Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel to
Callahan's" and STARSHIP TROOPERS: SURRENDER.
I am reminded that SF writing remains a tough gig. This news release
http://www.lrc.edu/news/Releases/2006/Mar-10/Nebula-nom.htm shows a
Nebula winner, and two more nominees, all doing the small-college
teaching-gig to pay the bills. Enlarge the picture, winch at the
steotypes, and then reflect on imaginations of people writing in a
educational/industrial cinder-block box. And is that an old
pen-and-ink gradebook I see on the table?
Sign on to be the "co-author" of an elderly or deceased SF "name", or
face three sections of Freshman Composition, grading (no, too
judgmental) evaluating (still judgmental) guiding (no, implies a
hierarchy of skills) experiencing (safe, PC term) the ramblings of a
pimply-faced generation that somehow managed to graduated from high
school without mastering that "subject-verb agreement thingy". Now
there's a real no-brainer of a choice.
Dave
Kent Allard
drhe...@webtv.net (Dr Hermes) wrote:
> Everything is much simpler to cope with when aliens arrive as little
> green men with big heads,
You haven't read "Martian, Go Home" then :-)
--
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts and minds of men? The Shadow do!
--Flip Wilson
Andreas Decker
no such thing.
And for once Lovecrafts characters are behaving like normal people. One of
his not so good elements is imho that his heroes often behave, well,
idiotic. If they would behave like normal people, there would be no story.
Just look at Wilmarth in "Whisperer in Darkness".
But here everything works. Everything. The people, the atmosphere, the plot.
You can understand why the neighbours shun the Gardners. It isn愒 nice or
right, but it is human. And the "monster" is so well realized.
Lovecraft at his best.
"Dr Hermes" <drhe...@webtv.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:584-441...@storefull-3213.bay.webtv.net...
Chuck C.
" But even so, I wonder
what the inhabitants of Arkham are like today, assuming the city wasn't
destroyed in the years since. "
Hey Doc,
For an update (mid-60's) on Arkham and its changes, see Fritz
Leiber's tongue-in-cheek "To Arkham and the Stars" in the collection
THE DARK BROTHERHOOD (AH, 1966).
Best,
CC
Dr Hermes
ah-HAH! That rang a bell, Chuck. Twenty minutes of digging in the back
room, stacks of magazines toppling as I rummaged through boxes of books,
produced THE BOOK OF FRITZ LEIBER (Daw 1974). And in it is indeed "To
Arkham and the Stars", along with many other goodies. What a gem of dark
humor and Lovecraftian name-dropping this short story is, as the various
survivors of the Mythos stories meet at Miskatonic University on the
anniversary of the Dunwich Horror. They're all rather advanced in years
of course, and Leiber fills us in on what they have been up to.
At one point, mentioning the meteorite that fell in 1882 ("The Colour
Out of Space") we learn that two divers were sent to see if any remnant
was still under the waters but both were lost (hmm, wonder why).
"Besides," says one of the professors, "we've all been drinking the
Arkham water from the Blasted Heath Reservoir half our lives."
At this, Professor Wilmarth* remarks, "Yes, we have" and narrator
thinks, "...this time I found myself hating him for the unpleasant
knowingness of his chuckle."
Stop! That's all we need to know, thank you. When in Arkham, be sure to
stock up on Poland Spring water for all your needs.
I love this little story. It is a neat mixture of horror and whimsy,
packed with references to the Mythos stories and their later
developments... and it offers a final fate to Lovecraft himself that is
both twisted and strangely appealing.
_______
*Wilmarth, you may recall, was the poor soul who encountered "The
Whisperer In Darkness" a great yarn itself.
jim rozen
>As dismal as the fate of the Gardner clan is, what's even worse is what
>the narrator leaves mostly unspoken.
Indeed. His comment about them draining the well, and finding two of
the children in in (although the remains were mostly skeletal) and the
fact that they could not seem to find the bottom even after all the
pails of water were hauled out was possibly the most disturbing
passage in the book...
Thank you for the review. I was really looking forward to it!
Jim
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