This classic sci-fi horror story was first published in Amazing Stories magazine, 1927. I’ve read it a few times now and think it’s one of H P Lovecraft’s best. I’m not sure if anyone else has linked this story to Thomas Hardy, but I find the gloomy fate of Nahum Gardner and his family to have a strange echo of Hardy’s tragic novels. The story is also ahead of its time, with descriptions of what could be the effects of radioactivity on the landscape, written in an era when the dangers of radioactive materials were becoming better-known but were still used in all kinds of products.
The story is told by an unnamed narrator who is surveying a creepy parcel of land, a ‘blasted heath’, for a reservoir. No one can live there – not even ‘foreigners’ – and he finds only one person, an elderly man called Ammi, who will talk to him about what happened forty years ago. Ammi tells of the pleasant Gardner family, who were shunned by the community after a sinister meteorite fell onto their land. Inside the meteorite was a bizarre, glowing substance: ‘a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.’ The colour is not one seen on Earth before and there is no attempt to describe it. As the seasons continue, all is not well with the Gardners. Their crops and livestock are deformed. The trees wave their branches when there’s no wind. The family descend into madness and a grey, brittle demise. And there is something lurking in the well…
What I have always found chilling about this tale, apart from the nature and effects of the ‘colour’ itself, is how the superstitious neighbours left the Gardners to a horrible fate. If an alien which feeds on life-force pays you a visit, you’re on your own!
I think if you haven’t read any Lovecraft before, this would be an ideal story to try. It has the hallmarks of his style and is set in Arkham (a fictional town in Massachusetts) but doesn’t refer to the mythology found in many of his stories.
‘The Colour Out of Space’ can be found on Project Gutenberg, WikiSource and in various Lovecraft anthologies. A film based upon it was released in 2019.