The Color Out of Space

This is one of the clearest and most direct HPL short stories I've read to date, being the third story in the H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Collection, which is available to download for free on Amazon.

It's equal in quality to my favorite HPL story, The Dunwich Horror, maybe even better, although this is only my fifth venture into the Lovecraft cosmic canon, so what do I know?

A meteor crashes into Earth from space and ravages a small farmstead, at first seeming to be beneficial with fantastically large and ripe produce, until everything starts to become brittle and gray and inedible, as people lose their minds and start to disappear, decimating the entire family.

The strangest thing is the meteor fragment that radiates color so beautiful it can't be directly focused on or described, and for some reason they never test the tainted water, which in the world of HPL is conveniently never explained and all we get is a third-party witness account from a friend, trying to make sense of it all.

But this is a great mix of sci-fi and cosmic horror and another valuable take on alien life reaching earth and causing havoc, and because it's H.P. Lovecraft we have no idea who those aliens are or what they look like.

But I enjoyed The Color Out of Space for its vivid imagery and relative simplicity.