The Colour Out of Space first appeared in Amazing Stories in 1927. It's science fiction tale with horror overtones and reputedly Lovecraft's favorite from among his many stories. It's mine too sometimes (when my favorite isn't The Dunwich Horror or The Call of C'Thulhu -- I'm variable on that).
The story is a remembrance of a time decades before when a meteor lands on a farm in New England. The Gardner family finds this artifact from the heavens and call out the authorities. The scientists buzz around and are bewildered and then eventually go away. But the Gardners are not so lucky and the meteor has disappeared and its poison spreads into the ground and into the plants and animals of the farm and beyond. As is common with Lovecraft the story slowly unwinds as details saunter into place and descriptions force us to conjure our own personal images of what is happening. We see and feel and smell the decadence with descends upon the Garner farm. Though it's rarely spoken of directly we feel the isolation the Gardners must have felt when their neighbors largely abandon them to their gruesome destinies.
The quiet unfolding of this story presents the relentless destruction of a family and of the land of which they are a part. The story seems free of connecting their fate with moral judgments, and so we are struck with cruel whims of a world which is on its best days indifferent to the particulars of human beings. Whatever the "Colour" is, wherever it came from in the depths of space it has as little regard for a human being as it does for a blade of grass and all the puffed up chicanery which is civilizations stands mute in the face of this deadly enigma.
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Hold on as through the week the Dojo takes a look at the film adaptations of this story.
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