Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Die Farbe aus dem All
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love creeping dread, fear of the unknown and cosmic horror, and anyone curious about where modern cosmic horror began.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
The Colour Out of Space is a short horror story by H. P. Lovecraft. He wrote it in 1927, and it first appeared that September in the magazine Amazing Stories. Lovecraft himself counted it among his best work. It tells of a farm in the hills west of Arkham, a made-up town in Massachusetts, and of a blight that fell on that farm in the 1880s. There are no ghosts here and no monsters with teeth. There is only a presence from far beyond the stars that has no shape we can name.
You get a story told at one remove. A surveyor comes to the hills to measure land before a reservoir is built. He meets an old man who remembers what happened, and he passes it on to you. You also see why Lovecraft's fear of the unknown still shapes science fiction and horror today. Let us begin where the surveyor does, on a stretch of ground where nothing will grow.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1A surveyor meets the blasted heathFree
- 2A stone falls from the sky
- 3The farm begins to grow wrong
- 4Animals and people begin to suffer
- 5What the story is really about
- 6How the tale is told
Punkt 1 von 6
A surveyor meets the blasted heath
The story opens with a narrator who has no name. He is a surveyor from Boston, working in the hills west of Arkham. The city plans to dam a valley there and flood it to make a new reservoir. He describes wild hills, deep woods and valleys that no axe has ever cut. It is a lonely, half-forgotten country, and he finds it a little unsettling even before he meets its strangest place.
At the bottom of a broad valley lies the blasted heath. It is a stretch of about five acres where everything is a dead gray. There is no grass, no leaf and no bright soil, only a fine grayish dust like ash. The narrator sees the ruin of a farmhouse and barn, a dry well, and an old orchard that looks sick in an odd way. Even the air near the place seems wrong to him.
The country people will not talk about it easily. They say the place has been evil for years. They only mutter that it happened long ago and that something is still wrong. The narrator hears the same thing from every side, but no one will give him a clear account of what actually happened there.
People warn him not to trust the stories of an old fellow called Ammi Pierce. Ammi lives alone in a small house near the edge of the hills and is thought to be a little crazed. He remembers the blight from its beginning. The narrator goes to him, and what follows is Ammi's own story, which fills much of the tale. The surveyor asks about the district, and Ammi begins to talk. That choice frames everything that comes after. From here the tale moves back to a summer in 1882.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
- Nothing to pay today · Renews every year
- We email you before you pay
- Cancel online in two clicks
Who’s who
- The surveyor
- An unnamed engineer from Boston surveys a proposed reservoir site and hears the area's history from Ammi Pierce.
- Ammi Pierce
- A farmer and friend of the Gardner family, he tells the surveyor about the blight.
- Nahum Gardner
- A hardworking farmer, Nabby's husband and father of three sons, he owns the land where the meteorite falls.
- Nabby Gardner
- Nahum's wife and the mother of their three sons, she shares the family's increasingly troubled farmhouse.
- Thaddeus, Merwin and Zenas
- The three sons of Nahum and Nabby Gardner live and work together on their parents' farm.
- The professors of Miskatonic University
- Scholars from nearby Arkham examine the meteorite on Nahum's land but cannot explain its properties.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 13,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 50 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 13 other languages
Questions about Die Farbe aus dem All
What is The Colour Out of Space about?
It is about a farm near Arkham, Massachusetts, where a meteorite lands in 1882. An unknown colour spreads through the land, plants, animals and people. A surveyor hears the story from an old neighbor years later.
Is The Colour Out of Space a true story?
No. It is fiction. Lovecraft wrote it in 1927, and it first appeared in Amazing Stories that September.
What is the colour in The Colour Out of Space?
The story never names it. It is described as a colour not found in the normal spectrum, something from beyond nature. Lovecraft leaves it to the reader to imagine, which is part of the horror.
Is The Colour Out of Space hard to read?
It is not hard, and the story is clear.
What is the main message of The Colour Out of Space?
The story suggests that the universe holds forces our science cannot grasp, and that ignorance of them can be deadly. It also shows how a disaster can grow slowly while people look away.