The Colour Out of Darkness

by John Pelan

In his classic story "The Call of Cthulhu" H.P. Lovecraft wrote: "The cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

Lovecraft was right, though he only glimpsed a tiny sliver of the true horror that governs the secret history of the world. The truth is much, much worse as several young people are about to discover. The miracle drug "Essence" opens doors of perception hitherto undreamed of, but there's a heavy price to paid. The price is to belong body and soul to nameless horrors that were old when the earth was young. Nobody rides for free, and damn few get out alive…

Genres: Horror

148 pages, Hardcover

First published April 16, 2006

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short Lovecraft pastiche set in grunge/Goth-era Seattle with a hefty serving of drug use and sexual abuse added to the usual dose of arcane Old Ones and eldritch tentacles. I'd say it was influenced equally by Forever Knight and The Colour Out of Space. There are short and interesting interludes between the chapters that link historical nasties to Cthulhu. It's an all right read, but nothing really original, though I really liked the Allen Koszowski illustrations.

[Alex Budris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth it for the jacket and interior illustrations by Allen K. A brutal little Lovecraftian novella. Keep in mind that Pelan was an (excellent) editor and publisher before he was an author. Anyone interested should check out another novella by the man, this one more of a gothic, and interestingly not represented on Goodreads, titled An Antique Vintage. The books he published under the Midnight House imprint are all worthwhile also, prob more so than his own writings. Signed and numbered limited to 750.

[J. Collbran · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Colour Out of Darkness (2006) by John Pelan is a riff on Lovecraft, part of a series of novellas published by Cemetery Dance (this is number 17, but what the other titles might be I cannot say—there are no mentions of any of them in this book). Basically, this is a tale of the resurgence of the Old Ones among modern Seattle’s disaffected youth, with an extra helping of sexually graphic torture-porn prose. It’s better written than I expected, but it is structured awkwardly, and the plotting is predictable. As Lovecraftian fiction, it’s mediocre at best.

[William M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pelan's novella has a lot of familiar elements that Lovecraft fans will enjoy, and has added his own spin with a refreshing backstory that ties together history's real life mass murderers to the Great Old Ones. The main story moves a little too quickly for my taste and loses some needed atmosphere and character development, but it's still a lot of fun with plentiful helpings of sex, violence, gore, and of course, tentacles. It's a solid entry in Cemetery Dance's continuing novella series.

[Carpentermt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Colour Out of Darkness by John Pelan is a novella in the Cemetery Dance series, # 17 I believe. Cemetery Dance is a well respected small press that regularly publishes a horror magazine that frequently features (but is not dedicated to) Lovecraftian fiction (it also is a small press that refuses to adhere to any deadlines, but that's another story). I have never read any of the other novellas in the series as I don't think any of them have been related to the Cthulhu mythos, however the high qualities of this volume make me think general horror fiction fans would do well to seek them out. The complete list of titles can be seen at their website. I don't know what the industry technical definition of a novella is; I usually go with a short novel. Maybe a long short story? After a little reflection this book worked best for me when I thought of it just like that, a longish mythos short story. John Pelan is well known to the mythos community. The back cover leaf of the slip cover has a small biography of Mr. Pelan. Alas there are no author's notes on the text so all my inferences are just that.

Some housekeeping: Production qualities are high. This book is a very attractive hardcover with a slipcover. Mine was #468 of 750 (The total number of books in the (hopefully) first print run?), and signed by the author. Total page count was 153. But closer inspection shows it to be actually less. Dimensions are 6 X 8.8 inches, so the pages are not so large. Line spacing seems about 1.5. The first printed page of story was 9, the previous 8 being publishing information and dedication, etc. The back page of each picture was blank. Irregularly after a chapter or interlude would be another blank page, although this was not systematic in any way I could discern. I counted about 13 such blank pages throughout the book, so the real page count was 6 for art and 125 for text. What with the line spacing and all, the book was actually a very quick read. List price was a bit steep for a book so small! The cover and interior artwork were by Allen Kozowski. I was not previously acquainted with Mr. Kozowski's work but the cover was very attractive and spot on for the story's theme: A Cthulhu-like head appears to spring from a nude human body's shoulders. The human form is probably female but there is a bit of deliberate androgynousness (is that a word? If not, it should be.). But actually the Great Old One is engulfing the human, probing it with tentacles. I found the image creepy and effective. I also enjoyed the interior art and wished there was more.

My take on this story is that it took some inspiration from HPL's classic "The Colour Out of Space" but was by no means a sequel to it. I know of two efforts at a true sequel. "A Little Color in Your Cheeks" is a very agreeable short story by Mike Minnis in the anthology Horrors Beyond. The Colour Out of Time by Michael Shea is a novella length sequel dating to the early 1980s. It was a bit more schlocky than HPL and, while it's worth seeking out, it dragged on a tad too long for me and had very derivative prose (it was from very early in Mr. Shea's career). I often think the mythos is best served by short stories rather than novels. In the HPL story a meteor falls from the sky to land in Nahum Gardner's property. A globule in the meteor has a strange color: "They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all". This idea of a color not really perceptible by humans, not in the visible spectrum but not really in the infrared or ultraviolet, perhaps more extrasensory, is used very effectively by Mr. Pelan. Only those who have ingested the strange drug essence can perceive this color, described as an unidentifiable shimmering radiance. However perhaps more than the color, the author uses the idea of a completely alien sentience split into lesser parts, each of which acts independently, trying to regain enough power/energy by manipulating humans to rejoin itself, patiently doing this over unthinkable millennia. You probably recall how a fragment of the color in HPL's story fell back to earth and still lurked in the well.

Note: minor to major spoilers may follow, so don't read further if this bugs you.

Mr. Pelan turns away from the conventional mythos. He takes the very Derlethian idea of a cosmic war between outre entities where one was a distinct loser. It was rent into parts which were scattered about the earth. The chiefest part was entombed under the sea. Each part is now manipulating human psyches with the ultimate aim of reuniting and seeking its revenge. Here was an original twist for this book: there were not multiple Great Old Ones, rather they were all different ways these fragments were perceived through the limitations of human thought. There isn't even a Cthulhu, per se. The entity has no specific name. Rather, Cthulhu is how Lovecraft was manipulated into perceiving the largest part of this sentience under the sea, which was in turn interpreted as R'lyeh, and this was just one such example of many such influences of the alien on human thought. Parenthetically, I really dislike the plot device that Lovecraft was writing the truth disguised as fiction. This book deftly sidestepped that mortal sin; I'll call it venial and note I was not too annoyed with it. To extend human perceptions it gives its chosen acolytes a drug, essence. I won't give away the source of essence as it is one of the central shocks of the story. Unfortunately for the imbiber, in addition to unusual health and enhanced senses comes an inability to resist the unspeakable psychic commands of the alien. In fact, between each chapter is an interlude describing the actions of some famous person under the influence of essence. Let's just say Jack and Vlad had a little help from their friends.

The plot revolves around a Goth-ish Seattle nightclub, Cafe Sepulcher. To start with, the story is told from the perspective of a down on his luck hanger-on named Josh, one of a crowd of former street people who depends on the owner, Lara. After she was disabled in an accident she got some windfall money and now provides jobs for her friends, Byron, Brian and Sheree, as well as Josh. Josh has been carrying a torch for Lara but now seems to be out of the inner circle. He also starts to note weird scars on the others. About the same time, terrible things start to happen on the streets of Seattle. Josh is invited to try a new experience with Lara and the inner circle: essence. About midway through the book detective Joe Callaway comes on the scene investigating gruesome crimes. He starts to get an inkling of a new cult in Seattle and begins to trace it to its source, setting up a final vivid confrontation.

The prose is quite good, very readable and descriptive. Seattle's seamy underside comes alive under Mr. Pelan's pen. The author does not shy away from graphic language, either for violence or for sex, un-HPLish, but it works here. I finished the book in one night, so obviously it grabbed me. The ending was jarringly abrupt but very satisfying to the mythos fiction fan. Initially the characterizations were very good; in fact the story was very cohesive and compelling while we followed Josh's slow realization of what was happening to Lara and his friends. His character development was a strong point. But maybe two thirds through we suddenly abandon Josh to the machinations of the cult and start switching point of view characters rapidly. This allows the plot to move forward at the expense of cohesiveness. I found this disconcerting; to me it was the biggest weakness of the book. Maybe the author just wanted it of his desk?

So what's a mythos fan to do? Buy it, by all means! The price is very reasonable for such a handsome hardcover, the story is not just a pastiche knock off, and the writing is quite good. I think you'll like the original take on the mythos as well. I am very happy to have this title in my library.

[Harris · Rating 1 out of 5]

An uninspired Cthulhu Mythos pastiche among many, The Colour out of Darkness is a fast paced but conceptually empty novella that attempts to dress up its blandness through a heavy dose of “edgy” sex and violence. Leaden prose and performative misanthropy makes it all a flatly unpleasant read. To be honest, what was I expecting?

Pelan brings the Cthulhu cult to the grimy urban wasteland of 21st century Seattle, but aside from the novel setting, does not succeed in building much atmosphere. Amblingly listlessly from scene to scene, the narrative is further broken up by lurid interludes which reveal various historic mass murderers, from Caligula to Jack the Ripper to Pol Pot, as Cthulhu worshippers. This is, frankly, gross, but it's not like the novella does anything new with any of these tropes anyway. Compared to the new crop of reimaginings of Lovecraft’s works that have been published recently, examining and critiquing his xenophobia and racism while creating eerie and atmospheric narratives, this one seems, even more, a relic of a creatively bankrupt genre.

[Henrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very personal take on a "Call of Cthulhu" spin-off, Pelan writes a provocative novella with descriptions of the perverse, bordering on the too graphic. Yet he succeeds in his endeavor, which is quite an accomplishment.

Rather than trying to make a pastiche on Lovecraft's infamous "cosmicism"--and also avoiding yet another "1920s story"--stylistically, Pelan has penned a dark, gritty present-day horror tale where the focal point is how the influences of the Old Ones might look like, if it was actually true. It is very dark, and we read rather detailed, descriptive scenes of a more morbid and perverse, sexual, character than what we're used to. But I think it works--Pelan gets his point through, all right. These people (cultists) are sick. They are insane; how would we expect otherwise, uh?

I also enjoyed the "Interludes", where he deftly shows us the connection between the Old Ones and historic, real-life characters, such as Jack the Ripper. And he is very subtle, really; never spelling out for us who this-and-that is. He expects us to have the historic knowledge beforehand. A nice touch--and very much in line with Lovecraft's own demands of his readers.

The only reason I don't give this story a top grade is that the story, in my opinion, ought to either have been longer (novel size) or cut down to a minimum of scenes (short story). As it is, quite a chunk of good stuff is there--yet not quite enough to satisfy my taste. The interesting cast of characters suffers from this, which is a shame, since they are the backbone of the storyline--now that Pelan has decided not to use the cosmic angle.

Highly recommendable, though; if an acquired taste, and certainly not for everyone.

Btw--I have the hardcover, limited & signed edition of this book; mine is #164.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is a spin on the call of Cthulhu, and I enjoyed reading this novella. I have a signed copy; number 570.