The Colour Out Of Space

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is likely to remain one of America's more controversial, although influential, authors. He left a substantial legacy of stories that blended together science-fiction and horror, with notable high and low points. At its worst, Lovecraft's prose aims for horror by numbers, by filling deep ravines with gnawed human bones and unleashing torrents of macabre adjectives. His best stories are clearly those in which he shows both some stylistic restraint and a fertile imagination.

One of the obvious challenges for a horror writer with a bent for science-fiction, is finding believable things that the reader can be horrified about. Lovecraft's imagination ran to producing, besides the Cthulhu mythos, various huge and squishy monstrosities, vaguely humanoid beings that are related to fungi and live in outer space, and ghouls living in dark corridors below New-England's cities. Today, at a distance of nearly a century away, it is inevitable that some of them no longer retain their capability to induce belief in the reader, if only for a short time. One suspects that the more elaborate the invention was, the quicker it lost its effectiveness.

The brilliance of the Colour Out Of Space, from the story of the same name, is in its sheer intangibility. The storyteller, who hears his own account from a witness, recounts how it landed in the garden of Nahum Gardner, near the well, on a meteor. The substance of the meteor defies explanation and scientific investigation, as it refuses to cool, but slowly shrinks and vanishes, despite showing no tendency to react with any chemicals in the laboratory. It has a spectrum unlike that of any known element, also reflected by the indescribable color of a globule embedded in the meteor, which on investigation turns to be hollow and empty. Finally, the residue of the meteor vanishes without leaving a trace, although there is a strong hint that something remains in the well.

From this apparent return the normality, the malign influence of whatever intangible entity that remained behind slowly establishes itself. At first it warps nature, so that trees, fruits and animals grow large but distorted, and in the case of the fruit, acquire a disgusting taste. It establishes its influence over Nahum Gardner and his family, slowly sapping their health and driving them mad. It remains intangible, but not invisible, as the area of its influence becomes marked by the luminescence, "shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour." In the finale, it sucks all life from its area of influence, causes people and animals alike to become brittle and crumble into grey dust. Until at last the Colour Out Of Space returns to where it came from, leaving behind a lifeless area in which all organic matter has decayed forever into grey dust. As behooves a good horror story, some small part of it remains behind, to constitute a future threat.

It is tempting to read in the Colour Out Of Space a warning of the dangers of radioactivity. Lovecraft died in 1937, well before the great public became aware of nuclear energy and the associated dangers, and the story was published in 1927. Still, Marie Curie won her two Nobel Prizes in 1903 and 1911, and toured the USA in 1921, making this at least a possible source of inspiration.On the other hand, Marie Curie herself was notoriously unaware of the dangers of radioactivity, and she died of radiation disease in 1934.

One might also read into it a more general expression of concern about the evolution of human society, of the general dangers represented by scientific advance, by modern technology, by people abandoning ancestral traditions to live in urbanized, anonymous societies. Pessimism and fears such as these were certainly part of Lovecraft's mindset, and while scientists feature in a lot of his stories, they are generally there to discover things they later wish to be able to forget. Lovecraft sometimes antedated his letters by two centuries, expressing the wish that he would have lived in the 18th century.

It almost certainly goes well beyond the author's intentions to equate the Colour Out Of Space with the color of Red Tape. Nevertheless, the story also seems an apt metaphor for the morbid dehumanization of society itself, for the irresistible expansion of bureaucracy, the gradual morphing of men into the anonymous custodians of the rules. Slowly absorbing the life energy out of human activities, until all crumbles into grey dust.