THE READING RHEUM: "THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE" (1927)

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE was another of the first HPL stories I ever read, and in many ways it's a better story of "cosmic horror" than any of the "Mythos" tales. There are no references to the many alien entities of the Mythos here, and Klinger has most likely included COLOUR because of its propinquity to Arkham, the same reason the editor included THE SILVER KEY.

The "colour" of the title is some force or property dwelling in a meteor that falls to Earth near a farm in a Massachusetts farming community west of Arkham. Researchers examine the meteor, and their investigations implicitly release the strange force, which then settles within a well on the property of farmer Nahum Gardner. The meteor itself dissolves, and it's only recently occurred to me that it may have been the "vehicle" in which the "colour" traveled.

Not that HPL endows the malignant force with any sense of intentionality. For pages and pages, HPL goes into extensive descriptions of how plants, animals and humans in the community are adversely affected by the influence of the force, either dying prematurely or being altered in some freakish manner. There is no clue as to whether the force that causes all this is in any way sentient, and calling it a "colour" seems to imply that it is just a presence from another realm of being, that may not particularly intend malice but simply poisons everything on Earth by reason of being so alien to mundane organic nature. Only toward the end is there some sense that the force may seek to return to the stars that spawned it, but even that sense is largely the impression of one of the witnesses. I'm tempted to opine that the doom the Colour brings to Earth-- which may spread to pretty much every living thing eventually-- may be in line with HPL's views of the entropy of all things, according to the science of his time.

I confess that though I think this is a great story, I didn't get into re-reading it this time, probably because its slow depiction of degeneration doesn't reward repeat visits. But I think I'll always remember my first reading of COLOUR, which was like seeing the entire universe transformed into a Gothic horrorshow.