Book Review

The Colour Out of Space 

by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Loveccraft lived a sheltered life during his childhood. Due to several illnesses, he spent a lot of time at home with his mother who both doted on him and psychologically abused him. As if he wanted to get as psychologically far away as possible, he immersed himself deeply in the study of astronomy. His grandfather had a talent for telling him ghost stories and both his parents ended up dying in asylums for the mentally insane. Though wealthy, they had spent all their money and left very little to H.P. as an inheritance. As a result, the themes of dreams, disease, madness, and invasion permeate his fiction. The Colour Out of Space is a short collection of some of Lovecraft’s best short stories and, more or less, they all touch upon those themes in some way.

     The theme of scholarship plays a central role in most of these stories. Lovecraft himself was an avid reader and student of science. This desire for knowledge gets transported into his stories. Almost all of them are narrated by some scholar or professor acting as both investigator and researcher. The main characters in “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Whisperer In the Dark”, and “The Shadow Out of Time” are in the process of gathering information for scholastic studies. The knowledge they seek endangers them, however. In “The Colout Out of Space”, he risks his health, sanity, and life to learn about an abstract being that came to Earth in a meteor. The color drains all the life out of a family living on a farm when it starts living in their well. Everything that comes into contact with the water withers, gets sick, goes insane, and dies. The terror in this story is not only rooted in a fear of invasion but also a fear of contamination as well. The invader is a bright glowing light that is made of colors never seen before by people; this contrasts with the grayness of the dying vegetation and the weakening people who rot while they live after it poisons them. You can see the roots of this story in the mind of a sick boy, quarantined at home while watching his parents lose their minds. Some powerful alien force, brilliant and mysterious, seemed to have entered the sanctuary of the secure Lovecraft household and turned everything into a nightmare.

     Keep in mind that the color that invaded from outer space is not only a being that inspires fear but a source of fascination too. Many people have criticized Lovecraft for writing stories that symbolized xenophobia and turned the fear of the Other into allegories. To a great extent that is true but that does not take all the dimensions of his writing into account. Some of Lovecraft’s creatures are monsters that inspire fear but the scholars that narrate his stories always take deep interest in them nonetheless. Learning about them, studying them, and pursuing them puts their lives in danger but they insist on pursuing their research no matter what the consequences may be.

     In “The Call of Cthulhu”, the narrator learns about a voodoo cult in New Orleans that makes sacrifices to a strange monstrous idol. Though obviously scared and contemptuous of these people, he meets with them to ask questions about their beliefs and rituals. After learning about their pantheon of elder gods that live on other planets, including Cthulhu, the main deity of their rites, he connects their practices to the writings in the Necronomicon. He discovers that other people living in remote regions of Earth are also waiting for Cthulhu to reappear; their rituals are meant to curry favor with the monstrous god who makes a brief appearance in the end when his city of R’lyeh rises out of the ocean and he awakens to chase away some sailors. But the story is not actually about Cthulhu; it is about the people who worship him, the people who seek knowledge of him, and the terror he inspires. The scariest thing about Cthulhu and the elder gods is not so much that they look deadly; they are frightening more because of what they represent. They live on other planets, they are older than the human race and they will live long after the human race dies out. Compared to people they are infinitely stronger and more resilient. Worst of all, they care little about what people do; they have no interest in the cultists who worship them or in anybody else. The idea that people are not the masters of the universe is what scares readers most since, compared to the elder gods, we are little more than a specie of flies.

     “The Whisperer In the Dark” is the best and most complex story in this collection. A young scholar hears rumors about crab-like creatures that people see floating in a river in Vermont. He makes contact with an elderly scientist who lives in the region who has been studying these beings and, along with obligatory references to the Necronomicon and the elder gods of the Cthulhu mythos, sends the young man a record he made of the their speaking and a round stone with hieroglyphics carved into it. After sending these objects through the mail, the old man starts getting harassed at night by some local rustics and then the stone disappears and never arrives at the young scholar’s house. He travels to Vermont to find out what happened and upon arrival, discovers that the crab-like monsters are from the distant planet Yuggoth. They have advanced technology that is superior to that of humans and one of their talents is the ability to transplant a human’s consciousness into cylinders so that the physical body is no longer necessary. Aside from the fact that they terrorize the old scientist during the night and speak in a way that sounds like a mixture of buzzing and whispering, they represent another kind of horror: the horror of ambiguity. We never learn what their intentions are. Did they actually come to Earth for malevolent purposes? Is it good or bad that they can transfer a human mind out of its body so it can travel through outer space? Did they kill the old scientists or did he willingly choose to submit to their technologies? The open-ended questions are what make this story unsettling.

     If “The Whisperer In the Dark” is an allegory of xenophobia, as some have charged, it is a strange kind of xenophobia, one that speaks of a fear or distrust of the Other for being superior and difficult to comprehend. And again, the narrator is interested in learning about them despite what dangers that pursuit represents. They do not invade his territory or come after him; he travels from Arkham, Massachusetts to Vermont to learn about them. In a sense, he is almost as much an intruder in their territory as the creatures from Yuggoth are in his. They almost meet halfway on almost neutral ground. This is not a xenophobia of combat and hate; it is actually a mixture of fascination and fear that is more nuanced than many have given Lovecraft credit for.

     The narrator in “The Shadow Out Of Time” takes a more proactive stance. Rather than being an observer and reporter of events like in the previously mentioned stories, he puts himself directly into the line of danger in his pursuit of knowledge. When the story starts, he falls into a coma and after he wakes up begins having dreams. During these nocturnal wanderings he inhabits another body, becoming one of what he calls the Great Race. These creatures live in a highly mechanized society so, having very little physical work to do, they spend most of their lives creating art, reading, and writing books. Their vast library contains the history of everything that ever existed or will exist and the narrator makes his contribution by writing a history of the human race. This book is a slim volume in comparison to everything else that has ever happened, again reminding us that humans are trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of the universe. He later goes on an archaeological expedition in Australia. While there, he stumbled into the underground ruins of the Great Race’s city only to find that he knows his way around because that is the exact place he had previously visited in his dreams.

     “The Shadow Out of Time” is a good story but its biggest shortcoming is that it is more or less the same as At the Mountains of Madness. The Great Race lives the same kind of life lived by the Shoggoth even though their physical form is different. Their cities are almost identical in description except that the Shoggoth were located on a plateau near the South Pole while the Great Race inhabited Australia. These similarities indicate a deeper flaw in Lovecraft’s writing. His range of ideas did not stretch very far. To be fair, that it is not entirely his fault. He did not start writing weird fiction until his later years in life and soon after he died at a young age of intestinal cancer. (Is that why he wrote about caves with terrible stenches and sadistic monsters?) These stories introduce the creatures of the Cthulhu mythology but he never got around to having them really do much of anything. His vocabulary range did not extend far either; the words eldritch and cyclopean are probably used at least once in every story, sometimes more. But his ideas were so big, unique, and seminal that he has earned himself a permanent place in the canon of nightmarish writing. He actually transcends the genre of horror since his style is midway between Romanticism, Gothic supernaturalism, and Victorian prose on one hand and horror, mystery, noir, and science fiction on the other hand with some elements of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis that were current during his lifetime.

     For an initiation into the cult of H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space is an ideal place to start. These stories introduce all the major themes he takes up in his other works. There is enough here to pick apart and analyze from multiple dimensions. With even some rudimentary knowledge of his short and troubled life, you can connect the dots between these stories and where the ideas came from. Lovecraft’s life and literature were a window into another bizarre but parallel world where reality gets morphed into all kinds of strange shapes and fed back to us in ways that twist our thoughts. It is too bad he did not live longer so we could see where this writing would lead us later on.

Lovecraft, H.P. The Colour Out of Space. Lancer Books, New York: 1969.