Welcome to the table. There is something so magical, unsettling, and strangely enjoyable about the genres of weird fiction and eldritch horror. As a kid, I loved stories of monsters and strangeness, but it would not be until I was gifted two anthologies of H.P. Lovecraft stories that I really started to fall in love with the unknown and unknowable entities and the existential ramifications of things beyond the understanding of man.
One of those transformative tales was titled The Colour Out of Space, a book that Dark Horse Comics has recently published an adaptation of, crafted by the skilled hand and keen mind of Gou Tanabe. The Colour Out of Space is one of the more surreal and strange of Lovecraft’s works that I had to return to more than a few times before I was able to grasp even half of it in my youth.
Now I will ask you to pause for a moment, so I can defend my literacy by telling you that even if my spelling occasionally seems to suggest otherwise, I have always been an avid and advanced reader. I was getting a personal pan pizza weekly thanks to the Book-It program, and my home is a repository for books in a way that a dragon’s hoard is a repository for magical treasures and mountains of coins. The difficulty with grasping The Color Out of Space was not a product of my inability to understand the words; it was a product of the surreal and strange nature of the tale itself.
In this new offering from Dark Horse and Gou Tanabe, the story has been moved from its more 1920s setting into a modernized interpretation that, with the artistic skill of Gou Tanabe, still managed to maintain the original disorienting and surreal horror qualities while providing a brilliant, slow-burn story that slowly unfolds in the storied hills of Lovecrafts fictional New England town, Arkham.
The story centers around an object from space that crashed into a valley outside of town, blighting the landscape and causing a sense of strangeness to settle over the land. After the thing fell from the stars, many years before we are brought into the story, the celestial item’s introduction into the biome of rural New England caused brambles and roots to begin to overgrow anything their vines could clutch or snare upon.
Soon after the surveyor takes stock of the land, professors from Lovecraft’s fabled Miskatonic University arrive at the farmstead where the meteorite was said to have crashed down. These scholars and the surveyor come upon a massive stone in the center of a deep depression in the land. This depression seems to be the origin point of the strange happenings that have echoed through the surrounding valley.
As they inspect the valley and its inhabitants, the plant life seems to have shifted and changed to something oddly hungry and alien. Soon after the shift in plant life, the animal life also seems to be shifted and distorted in ways that Gou Tanabe is able to render so masterfully across the paneled page.
Eventually, the human inhabitants of the valley also shift and change, becoming something entirely inhuman. Eventually, the thing that feels from the stars manifests itself in a way that is indescribable and unknowable to the mortal mind, and the reader is left with a sense of disorientation and a looming dread that the universe is vast and full of terrors that are so beyond our understanding we can’t perceive them in a way that we can give words.
Gou Tanabe’s particular style of art does a good job of trying to express that unknowable thing as it bursts forth from the landscape, but even giving it form in this adaptation of the story, the images on the page still feel too structured and tangible compared to this living color and consciousness that is described in Lovecraft’s story.
It is a wonderfully illustrated example of a slow-burning horror story that does not have slashers or demons or things that go bump in the night. It’s a reminder that we are all so small in the vastness of reality and that, sometimes, we just don’t know what causes things to happen.
Fans of horror manga, classic horror lit, and existential dread will delight in this Dark Horse offering.
Until next time… now I need Dark Horse to do an adaptation of The Doom That Came to Sarnath. What is Mignola up to?
Creative Team: H.P. Lovecraft and Gou Tanabe (writer), Gou Tanabe (artist), Zack Davisson (translator), Steve Dutro (letterer and additional touchup)
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Click here to purchase.
