The colour out of space

The colour out of space is a science-fiction horror story by H. P. Lovecraft, first published in Amazing Stories in September 1927. Its menace is a phenomenon beyond human categories.

Surveying land west of Arkham for a new reservoir, the narrator finds a blasted heath and hears Ammi Pierce's account of the Gardner farm. A meteorite fell there in 1882, and its shrinking substance displayed a colour outside the spectrum before vanishing into the soil.

At first the farm produces enormous crops, but their taste is foul; plants glow, animals deform, and the Gardner family deteriorates in body and mind. Scientific tests fail to contain what spreads through the well, making knowledge powerless before contamination.

Lovecraft builds terror through testimony, environmental change, and the inability of language to describe the colour. The future reservoir may cover the evidence without ending the threat, leaving modern progress over buried horror.

"West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs."