The Colour Out of Space

Ammi Pierce is the last man who remembers what happened to the Gardner farm, and he tells it to a surveyor sent to map the valley before a reservoir drowns it. A meteorite fell there in 1882. Whatever came out of it had no name and no colour that matched anything on the spectrum, and it worked slowly, through the well water and the soil, until the crops grew wrong and the family came apart in the dark. Lovecraft considered this his best story, and he was right. The tentacled gods sit this one out. The terror is simply that the universe holds things which physics and biology cannot contain, and that they do not care whose farm they land on. Read it free in PDF and EPUB.