Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Nancy Gideon, Jennifer Lane, Jacqui Murray, and Natalie Aguirre.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  If so, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more.

Each month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group asks us an optional question.  IWSG members can answer the question if they want, or they can skip it if there’s something else they want/need to talk about instead.  This month’s optional question is:

Ghost stories fit right in during this month.  What’s your favorite classic ghostly tale?  Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.

I almost skipped this month’s question.  Ghost stories don’t do much for me.  I have a very sciency worldview, unfortunately, so stories about the occult or the paranormal don’t give me much of a thrill or a fright.  But there is an author who bridged the gap between science and the supernatural well enough to freak me the f*** out.  That authors’ name is H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft did most of his writing in the 1920’s and 30’s.  He died young, unfortunately, in 1937.  As I understand his biography, Lovecraft was a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe and was inspired by Poe’s work; however, Lovecraft believed that the traditional ghost story needed to be updated for modern times and modern, scientific sensibilities.  So rather than leaning on ghosts and devils, Lovecraft filled his stories with theoretical physics, extraterrestrial intelligences, and occasional references to a certain newly discovered planet (Pluto).

My favorite Lovecraft story is called “The Colour Out of Space.”  In that story, a meteor crashes on Earth, introducing an extraterrestrial something to the local environment.  The local environment begins to change as a result.  Plants and animals become weirdly mutated, and the humans living on a nearby farm gradually lose their sanity.  No one can explain what’s happening.  No one can explain what that thing from outer space is or even describe what it looks like.  The best anyone can say is that it’s a color unlike any color seen before by human eyes (hence the title of the story).

I can’t think of many stories where alien life forms are presented as truly unknowable beings.  There are the alien monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There are the replicas from Solaris, or the sphere from Michael Crichton’s Sphere.  But that thing from “The Colour Out of Space”… whatever that thing was, it was the most incomprehensible of all incomprehensible aliens in science fiction.  And that truly scares me.

I love space and I love science fiction.  One of my dearest hopes for the future is that we will one day make contact with aliens—aliens like E.T. or Mr. Spock.  You know: the kind of aliens we can be friends with.  But that may not be what happens.  If/when we discover alien life, the aliens may be something totally and completely beyond human comprehension (and we humans may seem equally incomprehensible to whatever alien intelligence happens to discover us).  That’s a scenario that terrifies me, and it should terrify anyone who lives on this rather small and extremely vulnerable planet.