NOTE: The bookstore has many copies of the book in--go get one if you're still without a copy!
The “A” group should answer TWO of the following questions:
Q1: Prior to this story (published in 1927), there had been
relatively few stories about alien invasions or creatures from another world.
However, this story proved wildly influential and spawned a thousand imitators.
Why do you think it captured the imagination (or nightmares) of readers? What
makes it distinctly different from the other stories we’ve read in class?
Q2: However, despite the story’s originality, in some ways
“The Color Out of Space” is a reworking of Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” which
also features an invisible antagonist. How do we know Lovecraft read Bierce’s
story and was influenced by some of the story’s ideas? What (if anything ) did
he seem to change or improve from the original to make it scarier or more
uncanny?
Q3: Early in the story, the narrator remarks that “upon
everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and
the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiarocscuro were
awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no
region to sleep in. It was…too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of
terror” (205). Why is the landscape so important to both the narrator and
Lovecraft? How does setting itself become a factor of the uncanny?
Q4: In many alien invasion stories, mankind bands together
to destroy (or at least resist) an alien presence. So why in this story is the
family so easily destroyed? What makes them splinter and veer into monstrosity
and madness? Do you think Lovecraft is using the theme of alien invasion as a
metaphor to explore human nature itself? Where might we see this?
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