Cover Charge #7: The Colour Out Of Space

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.

H.P. Lovecraft has been dubbed "America's favorite racist" by some (overlapping time periods with America's favorite Nazi sympathizer, Henry Ford, and predating every modern conservative and our current POTUS by almost a century), and much like Ford's contributions to assembly line production efficiency, the effect that Howard Phillips Lovecraft has had on horror in all of its media forms is the chief reason he is less remembered for his questionable views on racial segregation and preservation (though, as you'll see later in the review, his racial purity, xenophobia, and Depression-era cosmic nihilism do come out in his writing).

You may know from my GFT Retrospective coverage that Lovecraft's work is a big inspiration for Zenescope's Wonderland lore and some of the greater cosmology in the Grimm Universe. But before that, his influence can be felt in the works of fellow Noreasters Stephen King and Dean Koontz, multimedia powerhouse Clive Barker, and upper midwest Amazon contributor Brian Harmon, just to name a few. Lovecraft's books and stories have been adapted into film (today's short story has been adapted at least two times, and Herbert West: Reanimator has a whole Full Moon—then known as Empire International—movie franchise) and comic book form (Zenescope also published a cancelled Chronicles Of Dr. Herbert West miniseries), and there's even the Lovecraft Country streaming series to consider as well.

1927's The Colour Out Of Space (adapted into Die, Monster, Die! in 1965, Curse in 1987, and Color Out Of Space in 2019, among others) is an unreliable narrative, told secondhand from the point of view of an unnamed land surveyor from Boston visiting the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts (reference is made to there being a nearby asylum, suggesting that this was the namesake of the fictional prison hospital in the Batman comics). An apparently mentally disturbed man named Ammi (every character in the story with a name has a strange, archaic name like this) tells the narrator of a local farming family (Nahum Gardner and his wife and son) whose land was poisoned following the striking of a meteor-like object from space. Much of the text indulges in pseudoscientific jargon as a means of explaining to the reader how it is impossible to categorize the object (color undefined by the visible spectrum, reactions and inaction when exposed to certain metals and biological samples, shape that defies geometry, paradoxical texture and consistency, etc.) before switching to an emphasis on its effect on the land and its inhabitants (greyed and dying vegetation, melting life forms, toxic water, spooked animals, mutated crops moving of their own accord, creatures so beyond categorization that only a presence or a corrupted aura of the once-familiar can be perceived of them, creeping decay, the cruel omnipresence of the sky itself, etc.). The anonymous, first-person nature of the main character gives the reader a sense of personal investment in the story, and while repetitive and scientifically indulgent, the description-defying description is vivid enough that the horror of it all sinks in effectively, and there is a bit of commentary on the blind greed of capitalist progress in the profession of the character that we as the reader are made to play. Despite seeing the nature of the land, experiencing the eldritch presence for ourselves, and hearing the fear and desperation in old Ammi's voice as he rambles about the ancient collective from beyond the stars that has taken root beneath the local well, we must return to Boston and propose the digging of a new irrigation system on the expanding, cosmically sentient land that the "rustics" call the Blasted Heath, because money.

But knowing about Lovecraft himself, it's hard not to read into the racist subtext (and text) of the story. I mean, it's called The Colour Out Of Space, after all.

In addition to being a horror story with obvious cosmic, psychological, scientific, and economic messaging that would shortly feel eerily portentious of the Great Depression (the crop erosion and spreading decay of the land in Arkham, for instance) and was informed in part by Lovecraft's dark fascination with the then-unexplored frontier of space, The Colour Out Of Space is essentially about a black object from an oppressive, mysterious, dark region intruding on a predominantly white community to strip away its vibrance and corrupt its genetics and livelihood, spreading a force of mutation across the land and leading to the Gardners' social shunning, madness, and homogeneous absorption into the presence of "the globule" beneath the well. Kind of sounds like a racial purity dog whistle, doesn't it?

As I've mentioned in several previous blog posts, I am predominantly white myself, so I don't have the personal life experience to be sufficiently indignant about subject matter like this without feeling like an appropriator. But I was "raised right," as the saying goes, so I know that racism and the speech and actions it reciprocally perpetuates are wrong. I know the Holocaust and Apartheid and slavery and Jim Crow and Issei/Nissei internment and the Trail Of Tears and the Reign Of Terror and the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism and the Khmer Rouge and the Crusades really happened and that no country is beyond reproach when it comes to systemic xenophobia, whether it be for race, religion, gender, or any other identifier that makes one "different" or "threatens the norm."

So, yeah; I have a moral compass. I am "woke," and that's not a bad thing to be if you do it right. Sometimes, that means that if a creative who just happened to be a terrible person is dead, you have the ability and the right of choice to separate that person's views from their work and the impact it has had on their genre descendants.

Kanye, Diddy, and R. Kelly will never be okay, but for me, it is possible to critique and enjoy The Colour Out Of Space divorced from its racial purity allegory (sub)text. As a read, it can be jargon-heavy and repetitive in Lovecraft's explanations of that which defies explanation, and therefore boring. However, the historical context of the story, and the effectiveness with which Lovecraft puts the reader in the main character role and communicates the terror of the (admittedly questionable) things in which he finds fear, is masterful. The exploitation of the reader's imagination, as negatively coded as that word choice sounds, gives the story a sense of psychological timelessness. I was unsettled by it for more than the obvious reasons, and I can appreciate that as the mark of a good (not great, given the aforementioned literary flaws) horror story. If the opportunity presents itself, I may visit more of Lovecraft's bibliography in the future. I think I even gave myself an idea of what to do for April next year!

For now, though, Stay Tuned for a trip through a haunted swamp tomorrow, a Thursday throwback to a low-budget Grindhouse western, and on Friday, I revisit Arkham (or whatever they called it in 1987) for a look at Curse.

And as always, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, stay away from that weird stone in your backyard, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can live a colorful existence, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news and coverage on my well-made content.

Tickemaster,

Out Of Cyberspace.