Stephan Sokolow's Blog

Lately, I’ve been trying to clear out my backlog of purchased audiobooks while I get other things done… and one of the things I bought was a Groupees bundle of HorrorBabble H.P. Lovecraft readings.

So far, The Colour Out of Space has been my favourite Lovecraft short story… a fact that I apparently share with Mr. Lovecraft himself.

You can legally enjoy it for free in both textual and audio form… though I prefer the audio version I’ve linked, as read by Ian Gordon for HorrorBabble. It really helps to keep you immersed when you can focus on visualizing the events being described without also having to dedicate effort to reconstructing the intonation and cadence of the narrator’s voice from the text.

Given that it’s a horror story, where presentation is key, I don’t want to say too much about the plot, so I’ll just borrow the beginning of Wikipedia‘s synopsis:

An unnamed surveyor from Boston, telling the story in the first-person perspective, attempts to uncover the secrets behind a shunned place referred to by the locals of Arkham as the “blasted heath.”

Instead, I’d like to talk about why I enjoy it so thoroughly. (Though, given how much I say, I’d appreciate it if you read/listen to the story first, then come back to finish this. I worry that analyzing the story in such depth will have an “explaining the joke ruins it” effect.)

First, many of Lovecraft’s stories, such as The Call of Cthulhu, have an element of xenophobia to them which hasn’t aged well. (The Rats in the Walls is uniquely egregious among the stories I’ve read so far. Not willing to settle for Lovecraft’s usual stuff, like implying that swarthiness is a sign of disreputability, it’s an otherwise excellent story where one of the central characters is the main character’s cat… named “N***er-Man” and, yes, that is the word you think it is.)

(Speaking of which, I suggest searching YouTube for a documentary named “H.P. Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown” for a good introduction to who he was and why he’s so significant to the history of horror and science fiction. To oversimplify it, he changed the cultural zeitgeist, like all classic authors.)

The Colour Out of Space avoids this tendency toward xenophobia by taking place in the backwoods of New England with no human antagonists or henchmen. A minor thing compared to some of the other points I raise, but it definitely helps.

(At The Mountains of Madness also does well on this front, which makes sense as it was one of the last things he wrote before his untimely death from cancer, but it deserves its own blog post, if I find time.)

Second, Lovecraft’s fondness for uncertainty doesn’t throw the reality of the threat into question. For all its beautiful world-building, I wasn’t a fan of The Shadow Out of Time because, in the end, the main character is left unsure whether the experiences were real or a sign they’re relapsing into insanity. I found that a very unsatisfying anti-climactic experience. The Colour out of Space is, without a doubt, a real thing within in its setting.

(Not that I need a story to go that far. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward worked despite access to the horrifying setting being lost and all it took was having a second person to verify that the main character hadn’t imagined the whole thing.)

Third, and most distinctively, it truly feels like a cosmic horror story to me. While I tend to find Lovecraft’s writings fascinating, it’s rare for them to actually evoke a stirring of cosmic horror.

The problem is that, so often, his stories achieve the horror in a way which offers some kind of escape hatch.

For example, in The Dunwich Horror, the monster “is a Cosmic Horror”, but, in the end, it’s defeated using magic. While the twist is great, it still defuses the sense of horror for me for two reasons:

1. If they can defeat the threat once, then they should be able to defeat it again.
2. “Magic” is sort of a “get out of needing to understand free” card. By definition, magic is something you feel you can use without understanding it because, if you understood it, you’d just call it another branch of science.

(That said, Dunwich is an example of something The Colour Out of Space does not do. H.P. Lovecraft has a recurring fondness for ending the last paragraph of his stories on a strong, punchy revelation that drives home the horror of the story’s central concept. The Mound does it, as do Out of the Aeons, The Shadow Out of Time, Polaris and others. It’s something to look forward to, but The Colour Out of Space’s last sentence isn’t punchy in that way.)

The Shadow over Innsmouth is another example of that “defusing the horror” problem. While I enjoyed the certainty of having the story told in flashback after the government proved that the hero wasn’t crazy by coming in to address the problem, it also means that the problem has a sufficient solution to avoid having to deal with the lurking sense of horror. Sure, there’s a lurking threat to an individual, and there are horrifying elements, but it doesn’t have that inexorability that I admire The Colour Out of Space for.

Out of the Aeons is good, but, like The Call of Cthulhu, the threat is too distant. All physical evidence of the problem lurked under the ocean for eons before surfacing, and then returned to the ocean. It’s too easy to feel that it’ll probably stay under the ocean for eons more before coming up for another ultimately ineffective burp of momentary crisis.

Rather than in the middle of the sea, The Colour Out of Space takes place in in a relatively settled part of rural America, and the ending does a powerful job of driving home that the threat is still lurking.

The Call of Cthulhu also shares a similar problem to At The Mountains of Madness if you’re going for horror… the threats are too comprehensible. Yes, they’re powerful, but, despite R’lyeh’s non-euclidean geometry, it’s still just aliens and it feels like, with the march of science, we’re likely to have a way to effectively fight back by the time they surface. (That said, At The Mountains of Madness makes for a wonderful adventure story akin to something like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth [1] [2] [3] [4].)

The Colour Out of Space works so beautifully because it drives home that this is the realm of science, not magic, but, despite that, it utterly baffles the scientists called in to comprehend it. At the same time, the description presented to the reader is very convincing as something that is genuinely incomprehensible in its nature, yet comprehensible in its effects.

(As opposed to the sense of the author saying “take my word for it” that you feel with some supposedly genius characters, where willing suspension of disbelief is pressed into service beyond its ideal scope. It’s self-evident that characters like Sherlock Holmes, or L and Light Yagami from Death Note are geniuses and you feel that. Characters like Hermione Granger from Harry Potter, on the other hand, feel like the author is cheer-leading their intelligence, but it feels like they’re only intelligent when the author specifically tries to evidence it, rather than it being a property of their being which affects their thoughts and behaviour more subtly at all times.)

The other big reason The Colour Out Of Space works so well is that there’s no “defeat the threat” moment. It’s more like the Portal games in that the protagonists survive without triumphing. Thus, avoiding the need to demonstrate that humans can win.

All in all, I highly recommend that you find 80 minutes when you can listen to an audiobook and give it a listen. Of Lovecraft’s works that I’d read as horror, it’s certainly the best… and if you enjoyed it, try some of the others I named. Lovecraft’s writing style takes a bit of getting used to, being strongly based on the archaic writing styles used in the antique books he grew up reading, but hearing it in audiobook form helps a lot, and his stories have a very distinctive atmosphere to them once you get into them.

P.S. It also was the inspiration for the most memorable part of a piece of Ranma 1/2 fanfiction from the rec.arts.anime.creative era named Bliss by Mike Loader and Lara Bartram. Given that it is still a memorable story to me, and that it won second place in the April 1999 TASS awards and 10th place in the 1999 annual TASS awards, I may re-read and review that too.

UPDATE: You may also want to watch Fredrik Knudsen’s Down the Rabbit Hole livestream special, Lovecraft & Junji Ito.

Now for a book that has been mentioned before as a source for some of the fanfics I’ve reviewed:

World War: In The Balance by Harry Turtledove

The basic concept is that, during World War 2, a bunch of reptilian aliens who call themselves The Race arrive with plans for conquest. However, unlike in the usual old tropes where aliens are either hyper-competent or completely incompetent, these aliens were blinded by their preconceptions. More specifically, while technologically superior, they make Imperial China’s cautious, bureaucratic approach to progress look reckless and expected to find us still fighting with knights on horseback.

The main thing I can say about this story is “slow but steady”. Aside from the concept, it’s not a story characterized by creative ideas that make you stand up and take note, or graced with a plethora of quotable passages, but, if you give it time to grow on you, it’s like a nutritious but familiar staple. It’s something I find enjoyable and satisfying, but it took until around chapter six for me to really feel that it had consistently made its characters interesting to read about and, to continue the food metaphor, it’s tasty and something to look forward to, but not exciting like going to a restaurant.

I think the problem is that it feels like Turtledove was determined to make the story about his characters first and foremost, even if that meant turning down other opportunities presented by the concept. …and the characters are the kind who start OK and grow into being good, rather than starting out good and growing into being amazing.

The worst part of that is probably how much time the first chapter spends on a couple of American baseball players when it was supposed to be hooking my interest. They just don’t start to get interesting until after the war comes to them and, even then, they’re potentially the least interesting of the characters. My best guess is that they’re supposed to be relatable, but I’m not American, not into sports and, besides, this is supposed to be a blend of sci-fi and historical fiction.

It’s technically a first contact story, but it doesn’t embrace the reactions by one group to revelations about the other in the way first contact stories do when they truly commit to “being about” that. (Compare Turtledove’s short story The Road Not Taken, which is sort of the progenitor of World War, for something which does embrace that aspect… or the web-original series The Deathworlders. Having aliens who are so behind us in everything except faster-than-light travel is intrinsically more fantastic, so it takes less effort to make engaging.)

It’s technically historical fiction yet I find Eric Flint’s writing much more engaging on that front. For all the moments which feel satisfying, like a village in Communist China celebrating an air raid destroying only the compound where the corrupt officials live or the banter between two British radar technicians, or an interaction between a white man and a black man in the U.S.A. in the 40s in the south, it feels diluted compared to Flint.

I think the problem is that the story is spending a lot of “screen time” trying to make the characters relatable when it should be recognizing that it already has that and focusing on what’s different instead. The whole point is to show the unfamiliar in a way that connects it to the familiar, not vice-versa. (Compare Eric Flint’s 1632 or Leo Frankowski’s The Cross-Time Engineer.)

You clearly love history, Mr. Turtledove. I understand not feeling that “jumping right into the action” is appropriate for the tone you want to establish, but literature is the interesting parts of life condensed. If you want to show a realistic pace of events, then you need to make up for it in the chapters before your characters have proved themselves interesting by packing in other interesting “little-known but obvious in hindsight” details to make up for it. That’s one of the meanings of the phrase “write what you know”. “Write what you know, because others don’t know it and find it fascinating”.

The baseball players are a particularly bad example of this, since I found them dull aside from the moment where one was able to translate “Espíritu Santo” because Spanish was close enough to Italian. I would have much preferred it if the other “ordinary human” groups were given more time, like the German soldier on the eastern front, or the jew in the Polish ghetto. They feel like they have more relevance. (Even when I’d rather be reading scenes of the aliens reacting to Earth or humans reacting to them, like the ground-based radar operators who first see evidence of them or the pilots who survive their first attack. That’s the most concentrated expression of what a first-contact story revolves around.)

It doesn’t help that Turtledove’s style isn’t very punchy, with the most memorable/quotable line I found being when one German soldier reassured another who had jumped at a sound from the sky by saying it was “Just one of the Ivans’ flying sewing machines”… which is amusing mental imagery.

(Sure, there was only one major quotable passage in Mother of Demons, but that book had a lot of philosophical meat to it and introduced me to the concept of r/K selection theory… things which this story lacks.)

That said, I do like the recurring theme that humanity manages to hold on by the skin of our teeth because we were damn lucky. The Race commander decides to start out with EMP weapons to fry all our solid-state circuitry… during the brief window of a few decades when we were using vacuum tubes. The Germans manage to take out the landing ships with the main stockpile of nuclear weapons… with a giant piece of artillery (that really existed) that fires shells too robust to be taken out by their interceptor missles and so archaic that they never anticipated it.

I also like the recurring focus on a world caught wanting to cling to old national disputes and racial identities in a situation where they must come together to survive a truly alien common adversary. …and the way that it manages to work prejudices and slurs into dialogue in a fashion where it’s not objectionable, it’s being honest about how such people would have behaved in that era.

That evolves nicely and, around the mid-point, you start to see characters, both human and Race, beginning to question things about their worldviews that they previously took as gospel, and starting to relate to each other.

It just feels like, in its weakest moments, the writing is… not dry, but too wedded to reminding the reader of how mundane things continue to happen in war, in a way which just comes across as feeling either slow-paced or padded.

It doesn’t help that the book is like the first volume of a three-part Lord of the Rings set… it ends at the end of an arc, but that doesn’t even conclude that subplot, let alone the arc the earlier chapters primed you to expect the book to follow. For a book that was so slow to get started, and so reluctant to feel punchy once it did, having an arc so long that it takes multiple volumes feels like Turtledove’s editor was asleep on the job.

(Bear in mind that I’m not saying all that content needed to be cut, but, if Turtledove didn’t want to tighten it up, I’d probably suggest doing something more like what Anne McCaffrey did with most of her Pern books, and writing multiple books that explore the same period of world-changing events by following different characters.)

All in all, I’d give it a 4.0 out of 5. It’s solid, well-done writing, it stays engaging once it gets past that initial hump, and it’s clear that Harry Turtledove knows his stuff when it comes to history, but I expect so much more from a professionally published book.