I wasn't a Goth or anything as a teen, just a fairly average, bored, go-cruisin-on-a-Friday-night Midwestern street kid, but I cried the first time I read Lovecraft's "The Outsider" and I ain't afraid to admit it. The story is the perfect metaphor for every angsty teen ever.
But that's not even the story I want to talk about here.
Lovecraft comes with so much baggage these days - the purple prose, his aversion to dialogue, does he deserve to march with the Penguins, was he just "a man of his time" or a small statue erected in honor of bigotry incarnate, etc.
I'd encountered allegories like "The Outsider" plenty of times in middle school, even, but "The Colour Out of Space" was the Lovecraft story that took me somewhere I'd never been before in fiction. This is a great story to read when you're new to horror: the woman-thing in the attic, the bodies in the well, the paragraph with all the ellipses describing a descent into madness, and even a small scale alien apocalypse.
I burned through Lovecraft after that and found other stories that hit me just as strongly (and many that ... didn't), but ... that first encounter ... cosmic horror ... those indefinable colors ... etched ... forever ... in my mind ... haunting my dreams ... a world never again the same.
But that's not even the story I want to talk about here.
Lovecraft comes with so much baggage these days - the purple prose, his aversion to dialogue, does he deserve to march with the Penguins, was he just "a man of his time" or a small statue erected in honor of bigotry incarnate, etc.
I'd encountered allegories like "The Outsider" plenty of times in middle school, even, but "The Colour Out of Space" was the Lovecraft story that took me somewhere I'd never been before in fiction. This is a great story to read when you're new to horror: the woman-thing in the attic, the bodies in the well, the paragraph with all the ellipses describing a descent into madness, and even a small scale alien apocalypse.
I burned through Lovecraft after that and found other stories that hit me just as strongly (and many that ... didn't), but ... that first encounter ... cosmic horror ... those indefinable colors ... etched ... forever ... in my mind ... haunting my dreams ... a world never again the same.