THE DEEP ONES: "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins April 18th.

First published in the September 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.asp
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Colour_Out_of_Space

PRINT VERSIONS

The Colour Out of Space and Others
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft
My Favorite Horror Story

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colour_Out_of_Space
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psOfe41Gq-I
http://tinyurl.com/6m6zgk2

I've been meaning to get back to Lovecraft for a while now. Guess now I've got an excuse. :D

As far as cinematic tributes to "TCOoS" are concerned, let's not forget the "Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" segment of this little movie masterpiece:

http://youtu.be/P_6vtAmFnkA

In the introduction to "TCOoS" in H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction, S.T. Joshi writes:

Some critics have conjectured the influence of Charles Fort, with his hints of extraterrestrial incursions from meteorites and similar sources, but Lovecraft read Fort's Book of the Damned only toward the end of March {1927, the month in which HPL wrote the story}.

For the curious (and we're all a little curious here at the WT, aren't we?), the Fort book can be downloaded for free here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22472

>4 artturnerjr:

I can see a possible Fortean influence on TCOoS. Could there have been some pre-1927 articles or something similar which HPL might have come across? Fort can be a lot of fun to read. I used to subscribe to The Fortean Times. Is that still around? This page has hypertext links to some of his other works:

http://www.resologist.net/ryook001.htm

Yes, the Fortean Times is still around. I subscribe to it, and I think, somewhere in my back issues, there is an article on Fort's influence on Lovecraft. I don't think there is any influence on "The Colour Out of Space", but Fort is explicitly mentioned in "Whisperer in Darkness". (The recent movie adaptation of that story has an appearance by Fort.)

I've been reading Lovecraft letters lately. I'll have to refresh my memory, but I suspect Lovecraft taking trips out in the country shortly before the writing of the story -- as well as getting out his old telescope after 30 years -- influenced the story. That and aping slang and dialect amused him, and you see a bit of that in this story -- though not as much as in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

It's the first Lovecraft I read and still my favorite. It was also Lovecraft's favorite, part of that remarkable burst of activity after his return from New York

I'm looking forward to re-reading it.

"a landscape by Salvator Rosa":



The best-known "vision of Fuseli":

Virgil Finlay's remarkable illustration for "The Colour Out of Space":

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FgDQr8ylH_0/TqtRI8gFxQI/AAAAAAABaP8/_zVhzf1et1o/s1600/...

Just finished my reread. Definitely holds up and then some. I think this might be HPL's most carefully controlled piece of fiction; love how he slowly reveals the horror, building up the dreadful atmosphere exquisitely, and never revealing exactly what the "colour" is.

Am I alone in thinking that the opening paragraph here is the most eerily beautiful prose passage in all of Lovecraft's fiction?

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

Oh yeah, and the scene in the attic with Nabby gets me every time.

The attic scene is pretty evocative. That and when they drain the well are the creepiest scenes. One of the things that stood out for me was the different crops Lovecraft described. I can't imagine he had any farming experience or really ever grew anything at all yet he seems to know about some crops I never heard of. Maybe they were common in Lovecraft's day. I don't know why that stood out for me but it did. Pretty good story. It is not my favorite or even in my top but I enjoy it.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

I really like that Fuseli's 'The Nightmare' and there is actually another version of it. On first glance I always think that demon guy is a monkey though.

"The Colour Out of Space" was HPL's favorite of his own tales. Leave it to him to attempt to describe, or at least imply, a color that has never even been imagined by humankind before! I think the story works quite well as both burgeoning-SF and as cosmic horror. It's also pretty gruesome! What a horrible fate for Nahum Gardner and his family - not even the children are spared. This is pretty grim stuff. HPL could easily have been predicting nuclear and environmental horrors to come.

I especially liked the hopeless feeling generated by the gradual deterioration of the farm and its environs, as it inexorably turns into "the blasted heath" (a great descriptor borrowed from Shakespeare and Milton).

I must admit that the "aërolite" crashing into Gardner's field reminded me a lot of the opening sequence of THE BLOB!

>9 artturnerjr:

Yes, the evocation of desolation is very well done. I kept expecting someone to point out that the land was blighted due to the wound of the Fisher King, but Lovecraft did not go there (Eliot's The Waste Land was 5 years earlier, but I don't assert direct influence, just a common mood).

The mood is enhanced by only naming the Gardners and Pierces. The visitors from outside, not being initiates of the Colour, in a sense do not count.

I am always annoyed when materialist Lovecraft tosses around terms like blasphemous and unholy, but in this case that describes the reaction of the narrator, so I will let it pass. I counted two occurrences of 'eldritch' where I would have preferred none. I'll give you 'foetor' for a well with dead animals in it.

Also effective is the writhing of the trees and the sound of footsteps. It helps intensify the horror that we never know whether the Colour is just some sort of organism running on instinct or whether it is self-aware with an agenda. It does not seem hostile to humans, just Cosmically Indifferent. I discount the witnesses' opinions that this is a supernatural manifestation.

How can the Colour be unknown (a color experience which no human has had before)? We see colors due to photolytic reactions in our retinas which induce firing of the optic nerves. Photons outside the human visual range simply do not give us visual sensations. I have a suggestion for a materialist explanation for this, but I think I will let the group discuss this first.

Most importantly, if you visit Arkham, don't drink the water!

>9 artturnerjr:

Yep - that whole opening sequence beautifully evokes the landscape.

With the following sentence, HPL sounds like he had German Expressionism in mind:

Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry.

Never one of my favorites by Lovecraft, I was quite impressed with "The Colour" on this re-read. The pacing is unusual and highly effective.

I think there are some interesting bases for comparison with "The Willows." It's almost as if HPL took Blackwood's story as a point of reference, and challenged himself to come up with something scarier. The thing that they have centrally in common is a completely alien menace, without any human element to afford a sense of malice. The little perforations of "The Willows" are replaced with the brittle and grey deterioriations of "The Colour."

In both stories, water has an important role. But while Blackwood's Danube serves to menace the narrator, it also creates a barrier between the reader and the events of the story, setting it in an inaccessible island wilderness. By contrast, the poisoned well and the flooding of the blasted heath imply potential contagion, so that even the naive inhabitants of Arkham (including those contemptuous academics) are threatened by the end of the story.

ETA: Both stories feature unnervingly animated vegetation. And both emphasize the limitations of the human sensorium.

>10 Thulean:

Good point about HPL's exactitude. His research skills were formidable, as he took the time to carefully gather data from both his own books and from long hours spent in the library. Not to mention his own esoteric and extensive knowledge about the physical world. Arctic exploration or farmer's crops, it seemed like he had been there, done that!

>12 bertilak:

I'll give you 'foetor' for a well with dead animals in it.

Ha! The perfect word, in the case? I don't think I'd like to see a cinematic version of TCOoS in odorama, that's for sure!

The "colour" isn't really a color, as we would know it, but it's the closest approximation that humans could understand. That's my guess, although it still leaves, "what is it?" open to conjecture.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

Excellent comparison between this tale and "The Willows"! Both the opening sequence describing the local environs and the appearance of wavering trees later on reminded me of Blackwood, but as you say, it's as if HPL refined these tropes to an exquisite degree. The tales really do mirror each other.

> 12 How can the Colour be unknown (a color experience which no human has had before)?

This issue is one that made the story unsatisfactory for me on my original read several decades back. Now, I'm content with the notion that some non-visual element accompanying the Colour makes it indescribable (the same mechanism eventually leading to the madness among the Gardners). Or perhaps it could just be injurious to sight within its own portion of the visual field.

In any case, this particular conceit (which HPL first trotted out in "From Beyond") didn't bother me nearly as much on this re-read, probably because I was braced for it.

> 17

Right. I take my clue from HPL's materialist philosophy. I think the only way you can get an unknown color is either supernatural (which I don't think fits) or by something which acts on the brain of the perceiver, not the eyes. Say radiation or some physical/chemical agent acting directly on the visual center of the brain, thus creating sensations which could not arise from optic nerve impulses.

I don't think the scientists created spectrographs of the Colour -- if so, the spectrograph (photographic image of the color) would have shown nothing unusual. The Colour (unfamiliar sensation) only manifests when one is in the presence of the object from the meteorite.

>12 bertilak:, 17

Maybe being able to successfully view/translate the "colour" would actually require a sensory feature (or an enhanced sensory feature) that humans just don't have, but since it exists as a key element of the story and while the characters are able to sense something, they just can't get it quite right.

>11 gwendetenebre:

I think the story works quite well as both burgeoning-SF and as cosmic horror.

Agreed. I think it's one of the great SF stories of the era as well as one of the great horror stories. I'm reminded of the introductory paragraph of the entry on HPL in A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the dean of 20th-century horror story writers, the "successor to Poe," the chronicler of supernatural terror in New England. Why, then, are we including him in a round up of science fiction writers? Because he wrote a lot of science fiction, that's why

***

What a horrible fate for Nahum Gardner and his family - not even the children are spared. This is pretty grim stuff. HPL could easily have been predicting nuclear and environmental horrors to come.

I don't think it was intentional on HPL's part, but "Colour" almost reads as a 20th-century Book of Job, doesn't it?

>20 artturnerjr:

Poe delved into SF, too. The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe is a great collection of examples. The fact only helps to align the two authors even more.

Through reading Joshi's HPL biography and via Deep Ones discussions, I've come to appreciate Lovecraft much more as a writer than ever before. Despite missteps, he often succeeded in his intention of relaying a genuine feeling of "cosmic horror" through unique, peculiar writing that fit it like a glove. I really think that "successor to Poe" is absolutely valid.

> Book of Job

I thought of Job when Nahum mentioned that he must deserve God's evident wrath. But the ending of "The Colour" is nothing like Job! That would have gone something like this:

So AZATHOTH blessed the latter end of Gardner more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand pear trees, and six thousand apple trees, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. And the woodchucks resumed their proper proportions. Gardner married a hottie from the city, and had new children who were normal-hued and mentally intact. And he lived to a ripe old age in which he would go laugh at the Miskatonic professors over full mugs of beer.

>21 gwendetenebre:

What Joshi has gotten me to appreciate most in HPL's writing is the really quite profound philisophical underpinnings of his work. I've heard Lovecraft fans complain that he wasn't more prolific, but that was largely because HPL spent so much time thinking about what he wanted to express thematically and philisophically in his fiction; he wasn't just cranking the stuff out for a paycheck like a lot of his pulp fiction peers.

>22 paradoxosalpha:

LOL! Yes, the Colour was ultimately a lot more malevolent than ol' Jehovah was, wasn't it?

> 20, 21

I don't think there's anything unusual about the intersection of SF and horror prior to their more rigid (because commodified) delineations in the mid-to-late 20th century. Even since then, they have tended to recombine often, especially in cinema.

So much proto-SF consisted of horror stories. Frankenstein? Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Even Dracula was full of blood transfusions that were basically science-fictional medicine at the time. H.G. Wells' Invisible Man rates more as horror, although it's part of Wells' "science fiction" canon.

In the DEEP ONES syllabi we've had many non-HPL examples: Our very first read "Shambleau" was horror in an SF setting. The brain surgery of "The Great God Pan" made it SF in a horror setting. Is there an SF element to "The Willows"? I think so.

> 23

No, I don't think the Colour was malevolent at all -- nothing suggests it even knew what human beings were except possibly as substrates.

This fits with Lovecraft's Cosmic Indifferentism: bad things happen to humans and nobody else cares.

> 22

Excellent paraphrase of Job! What is missing to read this as Job is the Voice out of the whirlwind. The Colour is not testing the Gardners' righteousness. It does not care.

I don't think there's anything unusual about the intersection of SF and horror prior to their more rigid (because commodified) delineations in the mid-to-late 20th century.

I think a big part of the joy I get out of reading pre-WWII speculative fiction is that I never quite know where the author is going genre-wise until I get into a story. Clark Ashton Smith is a good example - you can pick up a collection of his stories and skip along from straight SF to dark fantasy to cosmic horor (or some combination of the three) and then back again. Having said that, I think contemporary writers are getting less and less concerned with strict observance of genre boundaries as we move into this still-young century, which the current popularity of the literary "mashup" attests to.

> 26

Yes, it's po-mo and edgy to cross genre boundaries. That's a little different than not having them laid out so clearly in the first place.

I sympathize and agree with your enjoyment of the lack of convention in early speculative fiction. For an extreme example, try Etidorhpa!

>25 bertilak:

No, I don't think the Colour was malevolent at all -- nothing suggests it even knew what human beings were except possibly as substrates.

You're right, of course - my take was that the Colour was doing what it does, which was apparently to suck all the energy out of the surrounding enviroment it finds itself in, and then, presumably satiated, move on to the next place.

I'm sort of relieved that people here are finding the notion of a hitherto unknown colour distinctly strange. Last I was discussing this story I had limited success getting across to my interlocutors why I thought that was so very remarkable: one said it didn't seem any stranger to him than that a novel dish might taste different to anything you've eaten before.

Regarding whether the Colour is "supernatural" ... well, someone define "supernatural" for me!

***

TCOoS is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories too, and the titular "creature" about the most alien alien I can think of in any literature. (Which perhaps explains why the tale is less famous among HPL's creations than what I feel it deserves to be - it's simpler to relate to gargantuan octopus-gods than to the radicallly other.)

>24 paradoxosalpha:

Nothing unusual to the initiated, but I think that the casual reader would be more inclined towards surprise at the idea that Poe and Lovecraft (and the others you mention) were also science fiction writers.

>25 bertilak:

"Bad things happen to humans and nobody else cares". Boiled down to the bare essence! :-)

>28 artturnerjr:

True, but the "colour" really seemed to take its good old time and enjoyed every delightful little morsel!

>30 gwendetenebre:

True, but the "colour" really seemed to take its good old time and enjoyed every delightful little morsel!

Yes, but is that really the case or are you merely trying to anthropomorphize something that is beyond our comprehension (as I was in #23)? ;)

I assumed he got the concept of new colors from A Voyage to Arcturus with its jale, ulfire, etc...

Is it known whether he read A Voyage to Arcturus or not?

>31 artturnerjr:

True 'nuff! THE BLOB really is quite similar in that case!

ETA

Although you can see the blob, of course.

>25 bertilak:, 30
>25 bertilak:
"Bad things happen to humans and nobody else cares". Boiled down to the bare essence! :-)

To me that's what makes this story so effective - it's a tragedy. There's no attempts to unravel or stop a cult, no supernatural revenge, not even someone "sticking their nose in the wrong place". It's just a family destroyed at random. It's horrible - but not in the way we expect from a pulp story.

The last time I read this story, I hadn't read "The Willows", but, on this re-read, I definitely agree that HPL owes a debt to that story's menacing imagery of the trees and sky.

This was the first Lovecraft story my wife read, and she noticed the Job theme right away and thought "It must all be a judgement of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew." was the saddest part of the story. I had missed it until then.

On other thing I noticed this time, while the story opens with that wonderfully atmospheric paragraph, that's almost the only part of the story which doesn't, due to the frame of the narrative and foreshadowing, mention some weird or menacing event.

For those interested in exploring Lovecraft's philosophy via his fiction, Joshi's H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West is a good place to look.

If you're looking for sequels to the story by other authors, there is Michael Shea's The Colour Out of Time (adequate), and I think you could call Brian Aldiss' "The Saliva Tree" a crossing of this story with a H. G. Wells' style alien invasion.

I think a lot of Lovecraft's personal experiences come through here -- his early interest in chemistry and astronomy, and his walks around the New England country side. I believe, in one of his letters, he even mentions a reservoir either having flooded an area or about ot.

> 35

I had forgotten that I read The Colour Out of Time! Doesn't say much for it, I suppose.

” The Colour Out of Space” / ” The Colour Out of Time - I never made the connection to Poe until reading ”Supernatural Horror in Literature” just now:

http://poetry.about.com/od/poems/l/blpoedreamland.htm

>37 gwendetenebre:
Good catch.

I've even read that poem, but I missed that phrase. And I should have been looking for it because I did most of my Poe reading after reading Supernatural Horror in Literature which has a whole Poe chapter.

Hadn't realised Thule is pronounced to rhyme with "newly", but I googled it and apparently: it is.

I very much like Poe's "ultimate dim Thule" as a riff on Ultima Thule, however.

Here's an article on Lovecraft and matters Fortean: http://www.forteantimes.com/features/profiles/153/hp_lovecraft.html. It does not, however, appear to mention "The Colour Out of Space".

In a May 12, 1927 letter to Clark Ashton Smith Lovecraft said this of the story: "It lacks compactness & climax, perhaps, but must be taken as an atmospheric study rather than as a tale."

>40 RandyStafford:

Thanks, Randy. A nice long article which I'll pick through later. Plus I now have The Fortean Times website bookmarked!

What many of you are not thinking about are such occurrences as "impossible colours", such as a colour that resembles both yellow and blue, or red and green, or possibly, black and white... at the same time; not the brownish or greyish colour you get by mixing them. Perhaps it's a variation of different luminosities, or colours that make up the opponent channels in the brain, as stated.

>42 TCOoS:

I think you are right to be thinking of this as something happening in the observers' brains. There are no unknown colors, in the sense that colors are perceptions from light of wavelength from 390 to 750 nm. There is no room in the spectrum for anything new.

That is why I think that if the spectrum of the meteorite had been photographed, someone away from the epicenter of the contagion would not see anything unusual about it.

Since reading this story I read Alphabet in color about Nabokov's synesthesia. From that and your post, it occurs to me that the colour perceived might have been induced synesthesia or some chemical stimulation of the visual center that could not arise from optic nerve impulses.

It isn't so much that other colours couldn't exist. It's that our system for visual perception would have no chance of recognizing or even observing them. The real thing is: in a way colours don't even actually exist as such. It's just how we are hardwired to experience electromagnetic waves within a certain range of wavelengths. Some other species (bees for example) do see beyond that range. Nothing special.

p.s.: I always interpreted this story slightly differently though. To my mind it is about an entity that is virtually unnoticeable, except because of the colour. (I could be entirely wrong though, I only read this story in Dutch translation from Griezelverhalen).

> 44

Yes, I agree that there exist electromagnetic waves outside our perceptual range. But I am not calling those colors because we can't see them. I am speaking of colors as things we can perceive. If you can only generate color sensation by passing photons onto a retina, then one cannot create or experience a new, unknown color as sensed.

That is why I am suggesting that a perception of an unknown color requires something to be messing with the perceiver's brain.

a perception of an unknown color requires something to be messing with the perceiver's brain

Yes, interesting thought. Not how I interpreted the story though - must reread. And I have a copy of "The Annotated HPL" now, so now I can try the original.

http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2069-forbidden-colors-red-green.html is an article about how we can be made to see colors that were previously unknown.

> 47

What a fascinating article! Thanks.

So the colour out of space was all stripey: how lovely.

How it induced retinal stabilization in its viewers remains to be determined.

Perhaps the only interesting* observation offered in Charles Baxter's horribly condescending piece on HPL that appeared in The New York Review of Books last year**:

His three best stories, “The Colour Out of Space,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Dunwich Horror,” can all be read as inversions of Christian themes, as Houellebecq first noted. “The Colour Out of Space” contains a travesty of the Pentecost, “The Dunwich Horror” a travesty of the Incarnation, and “At the Mountains of Madness” a travesty of resurrection, which also appears elsewhere in graveyard-kitsch form in “Herbert West: Reanimator.” Whenever anybody or anything is brought back to life in a Lovecraft story, the resurrection is always botched, and the return to life is catastrophic. Since life itself is a form of sleepwalking anyway, the descent of the “foul” Pentecostal flame in “The Colour Out of Space” can only bring more destruction and misery, the God of these stories being a malicious trickster.

*But not original - Baxter admits he got it from Michel Houellebecq

** http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/hideous-unknown-hp-lovecraf...