SaberPunk #2 The Colour Out of Space

SaberPunk #2
“The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft

Greetings all,

SaberPunk’s second installment highlights my personal experience with “The Colour Out of Space,” a story written by H.P. Lovecraft and published by the magazine “Amazing Stories” in 1927. Lovecraft has been somewhat famous for decades for his many Cthulhu Mythos stories and lately for having been a racist weirdo.

The thing that stands out to me about the title of this fantastic story is that it is incredibly lame. I dislike it so much that, back in the day, even after I had read a great many of Lovecraft’s stories, and considered myself a fan, I was still so put off by it that I just could not bring myself to give it a chance. And it’s only about 20 pages long. So why didn’t I just take a stab at it?

Here’s why:

Crack open most any book nowadays and run a finger from top to bottom along the right or left hand side of the text and you’re likely to see a lot of empty white space. Dialogue. Short paragraphs. One sentence paragraphs. Breaks. Those empty spaces provide some breathing room. They provide hope. You can fly through those pages.

Now open almost any work by Lovecraft and you’re likely to see a giant block of lead-heavy text. This text is so dense that you can use it to cover and protect your naughty bits while getting an x-ray.

What’s my point? My point is that you can’t breeze through it while sitting on a noisy subway or munching snacks in a cafeteria or at home with your daughter running around the house threatening your son with “The Punching Game.” To read any of Lovecraft’s works, you need the perfect storm of quiet, of solitude, of the time to read, and all while still possessing the will and energy and focus to invest yourself wholly in it.

And need I say, those perfect storms, for me, are rare.

Oftentimes, even when I found myself happily within this most rare of alignments, I didn’t want to risk wasting my limited time on something new, and especially on a story whose title filled me with a sense of such overwhelming apathy. So instead of giving it a go, I’d just read one of the stories I already loved. “The Rats in the Walls.” “The Call of Cthulhu.” “The Whisperer in Darkness.” “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” All awesome titles. All awesome stories. With no risk involved.

So, how did I actually get around to reading “The Colour Out of Space” that first time? As with many wonderful things in my life, I have comic books and my older brother to thank for it.

Knowing I’m a Lovecraft fan, my brother(who is a comic book aficionado) used to buy me any comic that came down the pipeline that was even remotely related to Lovecraft. And there were a lot of them. Some were good, some were awesome, like all the ones illustrated by Richard Corben, and some were pretty terrible. Any way, they were always short, easy to read, and I never seemed to pay my brother for them, so it was never a big investment for me in time, effort, or money.

So naturally, one of those Lovecraft comics my brother bought for me had “The Colour Out of Space” in it. So I hazarded a peek. It was short, about ten pages, so I took a stab at it, and I blew through it. Which made me want to read the full story. Which I finally did.

So “Colour Out of Space” was written during the pulp era heyday of horror and science fiction. Lovecraft had allegedly grown tired of lame aliens and anthropomorphic aliens and bug-headed aliens and just plain shitty-old aliens. So he set out to write a truly “alien” alien. And that’s what “The Colour Out of Space” is about, a truly “alien” alien. The alien, the backwoods New England setting, the characters with creepy biblical names and the horrors that beset them are all perfectly done. This is Lovecraft’s best work, in my humble opinion, and I’ve read on the internet that it was his favorite as well, so it must be true.

So, my advice? Go to the horror section of your local library or ask your weird friend to borrow his or her worn copy of one of Lovecraft’s anthologies. There’s about a thousand of them. Make sure “The Colour Out of Space” is in it. Then make sure the edges of the pages of the copy you’re borrowing are yellowed and the cover dented. The spine should be broken in. For some reason I cannot adequately explain, it just doesn’t seem right to read Lovecraft on an ebook reader, but you do what you have to.

Now find a proper place to read. Quiet is a must. Alone, too, unless that special someone is also reading. It’s dark outside, and inside you sit beside a window, with bugs outside buzzing and crawling up the rusted screen. Maybe a single harsh lightbulb dangling from a wire above is your light source. It sways in the intermittent breeze that blows on your face. If a dog is barking somewhere off in the distance, so much the better. Now crack open “The Colour Out of Space” and invest the time and the effort. Ignore your family for an hour. You won’t be sorry.

Rock on.

Kevin Wright’s works:
Revelations http://amzn.to/1rbza7Q
GrimNoir http://amzn.to/1GaFsYw
Lords of Asyum http://amzn.to/242AqeO
Kevin Wright Author Facebook page: http://bit.ly/1nZem3j