“No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth.”
(The Colour Out of Space, pg.602)
Welcome back to Our Daily Lovecraft. Is your mind slipping, as mine is?
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“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward“
Let me just say right now that this story drove me insane.
I N S A N E.
But not in the way you think. Where I loved “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” this equally long (longer, in fact) tale was mind-dragging. At 104 pages in this tome with its small font, it goes on forever. Unnecessarily, I might add. Do you want to know the story? Here’s the story:
Charles Dexter Ward finds out he has a weird relative. He does a ton of research, not all of it good. He calls up the dead relative. Evil dead relative takes over Ward’s life in all ways. Good guys of the story try and figure out what the hell is going on. They finally find out what the hell is going on. Evil relative is defeated.
And yet for some reason this story goes on for eons. It made me want to scream. There was so much extra in this story that that near the end I started to skim paragraphs because yes, our hero people are scared and man they found weird stuff and geez what do we do about it now? There are grotesque findings, but we don’t even get to experience them because they happen out of sight, behind closed doors, and are just too scary to talk about. For ages Charles Ward looks up strange occult stuff and does a ton of weird shit in his room behind locked doors. People smell awful things, they hear truly bizarre sounds, it’s made very clear that Charles is chanting words no one understands, and does stuff that makes cats freak out and dogs howl and yet somehow throughout all of this everyone around him just stares dumbly at each other going, “HUH, I WONDER WHAT CHARLES IS DOING?” And then they keep letting him do it.
I guessed what was going on relatively early. It seemed obvious to anyone with half of a brain, making the vast majority of this story superfluous (and the characters in the story idiots). While I wasn’t 100% right (my idea was better), it doesn’t change that this story didn’t need to be this long. There is an abundance of repetition in terms of what certain people are doing, many times I would mutter aloud (in the spirit of Monty Python), “GET ON WITH IT.” I kept checking to see how much I had left to read, only to find myself lamenting the future and pondering just how on earth there could be more. What else could there possibly be to explain? Only was it near the end that things shifted a little in a few tiny ways that I didn’t expect, but nothing near interesting enough to redeem it.
According to the introduction, Lovecraft wrote it, chucked it, and said it was a “cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism.” I don’t know about that, but cumbrous sure is on point. It was never prepared for publication by him, so it would seem that we get it as he wrote it without anything to reign it in. I beseech you, fellow Lovecraftian readers on this journey with me, skip this one, lest you lose all sense like I did.
And now, in the spirit of what any of Lovecraft’s main characters might have thought when finding themselves in a pit of despair, get me the hell out of here.
Now this story was an excellent palate cleanser after the previous one. It put back into mind much creepier things.
A meteor strikes near a farmhouse, and after that, everything goes bad. The vegetation changes – at first it’s beautiful and impressive. But inside it’s bitter and awful. Then it all crumbles, brittle and gray, and eventually the same happens to the animals and people in that same area. Why the family never had the good sense to move soon afterward, I’ll never know. Because the story demanded it, I suppose, (and an element in the story suggested something was keeping them from doing so but…it’s not the strongest of reasons to be honest).
The descriptions of these changes are very vivid and what helped to creep me out was that it reminded me of Annihilation. How the colors of everything were off. How they reminded people of the thing that fell out of space. The way the fruits and leaves of plants and trees shined with these strange bands of unearthly color. The way they changed. The way the livestock changed. It just gives you that feeling of wrongness, and while the thing in Annihilation twisted and mutated and molded, this thing does some of the same and then steals that life for itself. Worse? It never completely goes away.
That gray desolate scar on Earth is still there – and it’s expanding. Slowly. While the colored thing beneath it feeds. And what makes that disturbing isn’t that it’s malignant. It just…exists. It’s just doing what it’s doing most likely without any real thought about the results it’s leaving behind. That’s why certain alien things can be so freakish; their complete indifference to the horror they’re creating. Because you can’t reason with that. You can’t stop it. It’s worming its way into the trees and people and all they can do is literally scream and panic and go insane.
Maybe someday it will have enough strength to leave this planet like it’s fellow life form-thing did, but that took a lot of energy, so who can say how this will turn out? The people of Arkham better keep on their toes, lest they lose their minds and crumble into gray ash as well.
From Annihilation
Featured Image © Nicole Taft
Annihilation image courtesy IMDB.com
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