Otherworldly Horror Distracts from the Mundane

In a period of sadness and a family crisis that will not end well, I have taken some refuge in fiction. I realize that this is the sort of refuge that, as a friend in college from England told me, the English find in tea. She explained that to an English person, tea was used to celebrate joy and to mitigate bad moods - it is a panacea so universal that it can augment the desirable even as it ameliorates the regrettable.

Fiction, particularly that which falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction, is my universal drug of choice.

Continuing to make my gradual way through a collection of Lovecraft works, I seem not to have hit the more famous stories, reading recently on the plane back to Boston both The Call of Cthulhu and The Colour Out of Space.

The former I had actually read before, though some new details resolved into focus on a second reading. The major one being the implication of multiple murders. Previously I had attributed the deaths of the Cthulhu witnesses to a kind of supernatural despair, but reading the story again I now feel inclined to interpret the deaths of the narrator's uncle, the Norwegian sailor who actually saw Cthulhu, and the narrator himself to all be the work of the global Cthulhu cult, eager to silence anyone who would dare unravel their secret truths.

In an odd sense, this actually makes the whole thing seem... slightly... less terrifying. Though it also hints at a more complex story that might have been if Lovecraft had chosen to write a full-length novel. The story is actually a kind of assembly of related anecdotes, all second-hand knowledge at most to the narrator. But what is very clear about this story is that it was here that Lovecraft really began laying down the world-building for his mythos, while other stories like the Shunned House and the Colour Out of Space just hint at it.

The Colour Out of Space is definitely creepy. Like a lot of these stories, there's a kind of second-handedness to the narration. The story is basically about a story told by a guy in rural Massachusetts (west of Arkham, which appears to be based on Salem) who recalls looking into the case of a family whose lives were utterly destroyed after a meteorite landed on their property. The meteorite, it becomes clear over the course of the story, was carrying some alien entity that drained the life-force out of everything near, and drove the family insane, driving at least two of the boys in the family (and several local animals) to drown themselves in a well that the entity seemed to be inhabiting.

Creepier still is that, while the "blasted heath" as the blighted remains of the family's property is now called, is thankfully about to be flooded over to make a reservoir, that reservoir is going to provide water for Arkham, and it seems like drinking said water would be a very, very, very bad idea for anyone.

Oddly, the effect that the unnamed alien that emits an otherworldly color (or colour, as the title suggests) has on its victims is actually reminiscent of Metroids from the popular game series (though as far as I know Metroids don't have psychic abilities.) I wonder if they were inspired at all by this story. I know that the main inspiration for Metroid was the Alien series, which itself was, I would think, heavily Lovecraft-inspired, so it could be that there's a transitive property there.