I had to search my memory on this one. And you hit the nail on the head. It sucked.

So very much agreed! This is the only Lovecraft story that I remember intentionally not finishing. I got maybe a third of the way in, realized that I was incredibly bored by the whole thing, and moved on to the next story in the anthology I was reading. I've never looked back.

You do have to admire the last few lines about how the narrator shudders and swears that he will never drink the water in Arkham. The thought of what lay at the bottom of the reservoir gave me the creeps.

"The Colour Out of Space" was also adapted to film in the rather horrible "Die, Monster, Die" which is memorable only for the queer special effect used to give the "colour" to those characters infected with it.

Also, it is colour, not color. Quit trying to bastardize the language you bloody Yanks ;)

The story does gain something if you've spent several years living in the area and drinking water from the Quabbin reservoir. That something is not abject horror, but it did get me to finish reading. I rather like the idea that Amherst and Northampton are tainted--tainted, I say!--by Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Overall, the effect seems to have been pretty positive.

I have to pretty sharply disagree. "The Colour out of Space" is Lovecraft at the top of his form.

Why it's great:

1) The alien "antagonist" is utterly incomprehensible. We never find out if it's intelligent, or even really alive. All we know is that it's bad news for Earth life to come in contact with it.

This is a feature, not a bug, and it's done very well.

2) The alien isn't hostile, or friendly either. It kills, slowly and horribly, but that seems to be just incidental to its nature. It's Lovecraft's central theme of "the universe doesn't give a damn about H. Sapiens" in its purest form.

3) The story has a very methodical structure. The centerpiece is the chronological retelling of the year of the infection. Go back and look at those paragraphs: this happened in March, this in April, this in June. It's this plain, straightforward retelling that gives the weirdness of the thing so much more punch.

4) Similarly, the story-within-a-story mechanism -- which Lovecraft used multiple times -- makes the weirdness that much more weird. It's not "this is what I the narrator saw", but "This is what this decent, simple old man told me". Lovecraft sets Ammi up as not too bright (though thoughtful in a rural sort of way) and utterly honest. So his telling of the story is much stronger than a simple first person.

5) What happens to the family is just plain horrible. The few strokes of character that Lovecraft gives them -- Thaddeus, the sensitive boy; Merwin, who cries when his brother goes mad -- are just enough to catch the imagination and make the whole thing utterly heartbreaking. Which, again, drives home Lovecraft's central point -- the universe doesn't care about these poor people.

6) You don't find the double death scene both tragic and frickin' creepy? Come on! Lovecraft gives us just enough detail -- a thud, a horrible sucking sound, a splash -- and then /stops there/, leaving our imaginations to fill in the the blanks. What came out of the well? We'll never know, and that's great.

7) Inherent genetic deficiencies: Um, dude. This is a story about syphilis.


Doug M.

Doug M. should win a prize of some sort. In fact, email me, Doug. I'll send you something.

Come off it, Nick. We all know you wrote this review under a cunning disguise as a satire on people who can't actually read, they just "like a good story".

Well said, Doug. "The Colour Out of Space" may seem like a lesser piece, but it stands up to "The Dunwich Horror" or "The Dreams in the Witch House". I agree with all of your points, especially #4. The journalistic style nicely heightens the weirdness of the story being related.

Give it another read, with Doug's points in mind, and I am sure that you will find that it is a much better story than you have given it credit for.

Some of his stories are as good as COLOUR, but none better it.

Interestingly, in his "Tour de Lovecraft" Ken Hite rates "The Colour out of Space" as Lovecraft's single best work. And he has a point.

I seem to remember in the letters that Lovecraft considered "Coulour..." to be his best work. I don't think that qualifies it for immunity from criticism, but it is notable. I haven't read the story in ten years, but I remember it as a nice, spare counterpoint to the occasionally adjective-spastic "In the Mountains of Madness." I think I remember being more frightened by specifically NOT witnessing the events and having to comprehend them through the duel filters of a bumpkin and a surveyor.

Actually, in my estimation this is one of Lovecraft's best. It really captures the kind of horror he's good at, which is really the polar opposite of the Godzilla-will-destroy-Tokyo kind of horror you fault this story for not having.

What Lovecraft is really good at is an unsettling atmosphere, the sense that things are in motion that are so far beyond the main players that they can do nothing but watch, and in some cases suffer.

I think this story is one of his best examples of atmosphere, and the pathos of the farmer family as they and everything they have ever known withers away deserves more credit, I think.

One gets the sense from the last few reviews that you don't actually like Lovecraft's writing. As you voluntarily offered to write these, that must not be the case, but it's tough to not see your brief "What's Awesome" sections consistently overshadowed by the more extensive "What's Horrible" sections. Perhaps this will turn around with "Doorstep"?

Are you kidding? "The Colour out of Space" is my favourite HPL story! I'm obviously not the only one either *cough* Ken Hite :-P

There's a word for seppos that make declarations like you do about color.

Pretty sure it rhymes with banker. :)

If you want to get all nitpicky like that, The Best of H. P. Lovecraft is obviously a collection, not an anthology.

Two days of almost unadulterated positivity coming, folks! Stay with me!

Uohahahha. This is the best, BEST story of Lovecraft, even considered this way by himself, and you tell us is crap.

Honestly, I'm not going to read anymore reviews here

And little shall you be missed.

I don't think "Colour" is HPL's best work, but it certainly is good Lovecraft. It doesn't have the epic scope of "At the Moutain of Madness" (my favourite Cthulu-mythos story), but it's solid. However, one point that really is irksome is the dialogue. Allow me to quote :

"Nothin'... nothin'... the colour... it burns... cold an' wet, but it burns... it lived in the well... I seen it... a kind of smoke... jest like the flowers last spring... the well shone at night... Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas... everything alive... suckin' the life out of everything... in that stone... it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place... dun't know what it wants... that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone... they smashed it... it was the same colour... jest the same, like the flowers an' plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds... seeds... they growed... I seen it the fust time this week... must a' got strong on Zenas... he was a big boy, full o' life... it beats down your mind an' then gets ye... burns ye up... in the well water... you was right about that... evil water... Zenas never come back from the well... can't git away... draws ye... ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use... I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took... whar's Nabby, Ammi?... my head's no good... dun't know how long sense I fed her... it'll git her ef we ain't keerful... jest a colour... her face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night... an' it burns an' sucks... it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said so... he was right... look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more... sucks the life out..."

As Steve King once pointed out, the guy was a great writer, but boy did he suck a dialogue. It litterally took longer to read (and understand) that it would have taken to hear, even in degenerate-consanguinous-hillbilly speech. Which may be the point of it, but it still is annoying as hell.

Stephen King used exactly that quote. And he was right. Lovecraft sucked at dialogue generally, he shouldn't ever have tried to do dialect, and this sort of exposition-by-rambling was just a bad idea.

On the other hand, there's stuff like this:



"Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.

"It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good....

"And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.

"By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.

"Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest playmate."

* * *

Now, I submit that this is just awesome good writing. Look how plain and understated the narrative voice is. Yet Lovecraft is constantly slipping in these frickin' creepy little details. 'Even when her expression changed...' changed how? To what? That's very deliberately left to our own sick imaginations. And 'the way she made faces at him' doubles it down.

And then just one paragraph later, we have the horses go mad too. And 'each one had to be shot for its own good'. God, that's an elegant little shiv of a sentence. Not 'they all', but 'each one' -- you see the difference? And 'for its own good'! Whoo. That's a writer who knows what he's doing.

Then look at the next paragraph. The sinister well water -- "an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty" is another elegant little gem of a sentence -- followed by the description of the family's horrible yet strangely dull and enervating life, wrapping up in that great line about walking "between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom"... and then, /pow/, back to the well again with that gut-punch of a next sentence. Followed in turn by "two in one family was pretty bad", which is just excellent on multiple levels.

Lovecraft really shines with this detached, almost impassive voice. And people who criticize "Colour" for lacking a plot are missing a huge point: that detached voice draws the reader in and keeps us wondering, Jesus, what's going to happen next? In the same book-length essay where Stephen King criticized Lovecraft's dialogue, he pointed out that, for him, the job of the horror writer is to bring us to the sheeted corpse and then make us lift up the sheet. I think Lovecraft succeeds admirably here; what happens to the poor family is disgusting and sad, but /we want to know what happens next/. That, for me, is pure authorial Win.


Doug M.

Couldn't agree more. The real strenght in Lovecraft's work, at a stylistic level, is that he is always so clinical and detached when on third-person narrative - and even his first-person narrative, like At the Mountains of Madness, or the Herbert West, Reanimator sequence are always rational, calm people - up to the moment they lose it and end up in a room with padded walls, of course.

For the curious, the essay we're referring to is called On Writing, was written by King before and after his accident (he got hit by a drunk driver and nearly died) and is a great book if you are interested in writing as a craft. Or in Stephen King. Plus it's real funny.

I disagree completely with the idea that there's no suspense because of the story within a story idea. The whole point of the story is that a piece of that thing is still in the well.

The idea is that it blighted an entire farm and destroyed every living thing, and will now become the *drinking water* of an entire town.

The idea that what should be safe (drinking water) will secretly kill you and everyone you love is a very scary prospect and something that is still used today.

It had nothing at all to do with "racial purity", it was poison! Read the story again.

Putting aside the silliness of worrying about how Lovecraft spelled "color," it's anachronistic. The history of American spelling reform is mildly complicated -- for example, Teddy Roosevelt tried to force through the Simplified Spelling Board's version in 1906, including the change from "colour" to "color," but encountered a lot of opposition. Spelling reform really got on firm ground with the 1928 Webster's dictionary. Lovecraft wrote "The Colour out of Space" in March 1927.

I'm with those who love this story. I'd rank it as one of HPLs best, up there with ATMOM.
There is no easy denounement for the reader to comprehend. There is no easy wrap up, no explanation. No-one wins.
It is an absolute distillation of everything HPL was trying to achieve, especially in his later years.
Incomprehensible events happen and human suffering occurs merely as a by-product of those events.
We are not important, and we do not understand, is the lesson here.

Compare this to Dunwich, where we have white trash shagging monsters and good guys (middle class librarians) running around in the middle of the night with guns and spells.

I love this story so much I did a Public Domain reading of it (took weeks, I'd never done anything like it before) and put it on the Internet Archive for free download. (Just for -colour- it's in my Irish accent.)
http://www.archive.org/details/The_Colour_Out_of_Space

My favourite saying about HPL is there are three possible outcomes:
1: You go mad
2: You die
3: You go mad, then you die

I think it's Lovecraft's greatest story, and one of the absolute masterpieces of cosmic terror.

I'd call that an authoritative opinion.