The Colour Out of Space (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss

H. P. Lovecraft, George Henry Weiss

• Publisher: Fantasy and Horror Classics
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781447418337
• eBook ISBN: 9781447481201
• Subtopic: Science Fiction

It was a colour that had no place on Earth. And it brought only a slow, agonizing corruption.

A surveyor visiting the remote, desolate area known as the "blasted heath" in rural Massachusetts encounters a local man who tells him the horrifying, impossible history of the land.

Years ago, a strange meteorite crashed into the farm of Nahum Gardner. The meteorite was unlike anything scientists had ever seen; it was warm, impossibly dense, and shimmered with a color that defied the known spectrum--a pulsating hue that suggested an alien dimension.

Though the meteorite disintegrated, its essence leached into the well water and the soil. The land began to change in terrifying ways: crops grew huge and luminous but were rotten inside; animals became strangely deformed and aggressive; and most horrifically, the Gardner family began a slow, irreversible descent into madness. One by one, they fall victim to the pervasive, unnameable influence, which drains the life, color, and sanity from every living thing it touches.

The Colour Out of Space is widely considered H. P. Lovecraft's greatest single short story and a masterpiece of cosmic horror. It is a terrifying meditation on the fear of the unknown, where the antagonist is not a creature with teeth and claws, but an alien environmental force--an invisible, creeping corruption that confirms humanity's fragile place in a universe full of indifferent, indescribable physics.

Some gifts from the stars are a curse beyond measure.

Table of contents

• H. P. Lovecraft
• THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE