"It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands... The shaft of phosphorescence from the well grew brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men a sense of doom..." - H. P. Lovecraft

Virgil Finlay - The Colour Out of Space

(Famous Fantastic Mysteries - October 1941)

H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space, 1927

The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

Was the color out of space actually radioactive?

On a meta level, the Color is as much radioactive as Cthulhu is interdimensional, or as much as the Yithians can time travel. It's a vaguely scientific term to explain the nonsensical effects in a sci-fi story written by a guy who's terrified of air conditioners.

On an in-universe level, yes and no. The Color is alive and infectious, but the radiation aspect is very much a part of it. It's a being made of something on the radiation spectrum (or, more accurately, off the known spectrum), but it's not radioactive in the way a nuke is, but in the way that the Sun is. But its effects that appear as radioactive to us may be a part of its life cycle, not an effect of the light itself.

I love the Color Out of Space because I genuinely cannot explain it to you, I can only explain its effects. One of the few times HPL actually succeeded at describing something unknowable. I can tell you vaguely what Cthulhu looks like, what he wants, why he acts the way he does. But the Color? The Color is perfectly vague. It showed up, it did some weird shit, and it left (but not entirely).

Anyways insert obligatory A MYSTERIOUS COLOR UNLIKE ANY SEEN ON EARTH reference here.

The Colour Out Of Space:

The Most Dangerous Drinking Game- Lovecraft Edition

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any deaths pls don't sue me

"In the well. He lives in the well."

The Colour from the Colour Out of Space is an Avatar of the Spiral

small domino: my biodad is shitty

big domino: my therapist, during a video meeting, draws fanart of Cthulhu except as a shoggoth which is also the Colour Out Of Space

[Sees that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison in the well—seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognisable chromaticism]

Plumber: “…yeah, there’s your problem right there, bud”

I was re-reading The Colour out of Space again recently, and Lovecraft’s racism/classism/xenophobia shows up very little in that story, which is nice, but there is this one line that made me laugh a lot, actually:

Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stores of whispered magic have given them.

Because he’s talking about French-Canadians here.

WHAT DARK SECRETS COULD BE KNOWN TO THE QUEBECOIS??!

Also the thing he’s exoticizing them for is… having folklore and folktales. And, like, every culture does that. English people have folklore and folktales. New England people must have folklore and folktales, right? Or did Howard the Lovescraft somehow manage to grow up in a place with the cultural background of a raw potato?

Title: The Colour Out of Space (1927) Author: H.P.Lovecraft Vote: 6.5/10 Anguishing tale in which we witness the slow disintegration of a family by what appears to be an alien being in whose presence everything changes, be it an animal, a person, a plant or the very air you breathe. Over the years, a quiet farm turns into a chasm of madness and death from which nothing escapes. Even the alien is in a sense as trapped as the hapless inhabitants of the farm.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories——The Colour out of Space by xiaotao PIPI

back with the media work! reading the colour out of space and jotting down anything of interest

listening to musician suggested to me, rav. rlly good tbh!

The Colour Out of Space

the "chroma" out of space

Eso deciding to make apocrypha aesthetically varied by adding an area which isn't drenched in greens is fine; adding aesthetic variety to a daedric prince's realm is a great idea.

But then someone decided to name this new vibrant area "The Chroma Incognito". Ohhh 'the hidden/unknown colour'? interesting interesting, what does this mean? Are we going to find out what's so special about this lil area? Why 'hidden/unknown colour'? How does that relate to hermaeus mora's sphere of hoarding information?

Skipping the nothingness the game gives you for in-universe answers to these questions (you can get them by reading uesp's page on this area), and instead looking at what could influence the writers' decisions... I find myself remembering all the advertising for that chapter mentioning lovecraft. Zos really wanted everyone to know how influenced by hp lovecraft this chapter was going to be, and you can see it in soooooo many of the names and titles chosen (the tagline for the chapter story was "shadow over morrowind", y'know, like the story "shadow over innsmouth"?). Which brings us back to the "Chroma Incognito"...

It's the colour out of space. That area of apocrypha is referencing the story (and eponymous creature in it) "The Color Out of Space", by hp lovecraft. This is a problem if you've actually read the story: the chroma incognito, apocrypha, not even the entire chapter itself ha ve anything to do with the plot or themes in "The Color Out of Space" story. Hell, nothing in the chapter even comes close to working like how the 'colour out of space' monster itself works.

This little quirk is a pattern that continues with the rest of the lovecraft-influenced aspects in the necrom chapter: the supposed lovecraft influence starts AND stops at second-hand knowledge of names, like the writers haven't actually read any of the works they're supposedly pulling from. Like they're actually referring to a memeified version overheard by a friend of a friend.

"The Color Out of Space" story deals with things like slowly encroaching dread, radiation poisoning, wrongness, decay, environmental destruction, something that should not be appearing suddenly and having no control over the horror it slowly is wreaking on your life, the horror of not knowing/not having control, how dependent we are on our environment, corruption in every sense of the word, etc etc. Is any of this in any of the various bits and bobs that reference the story/creature in Necrom? Nope.

Honestly if you wanted an area that really referenced the colour out of space, it would be a brittle grey area devoid of life or energy or colour. (hmm, kinda like the greymarch...)