[2] In the tale, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the "blasted heath" (most likely after a line from either Milton's Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's Macbeth)[3] in the hills west of the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts.

The narrator discovers that many years ago a meteorite crashed there, poisoning every living being nearby: vegetation grows large but foul-tasting, animals are driven mad and deformed into grotesque shapes, and the people go insane or die one by one.

The narrator, an unnamed surveyor from Boston, describes his attempts to uncover the secrets behind a shunned place referred to by the locals of the hills west of Arkham as the "blasted heath".

Nahum has a moment of lucidity and tells Pierce that the color that arrived on the meteorite is responsible, and that it has been siphoning the life out of the surrounding area.

When some of the men return the following day, they find only Pierce's dead horse, acres of grey dust, and untouched inorganic matter.

American writer and pulp fiction enthusiast Will Murray cites paranormal investigator Charles Fort, and the "thunderstones" (lightning-drawing rocks that may have fallen from the sky) he describes in The Book of the Damned, as possible inspirations for the behavior of the meteorite.

[10] Edward Guimont and Horace A. Smith have proposed that the March 1926 rocket test flight by Robert H. Goddard on a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts may also have served as an influence on the story.

Most notably, Joshi points to Hugh Elliott's Modern Science and Materialism, a 1919 nonfiction book that mentions the "extremely limited" senses of humans, such that of the many "aethereal waves" striking the eyes, "The majority cannot be perceived by the retina at all".

[13] Completed by the end of March, "The Colour Out of Space" first appeared in Hugo Gernsback's science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in September 1927.

[14] Lovecraft did not write another major short story until the following year, when he authored "The Dunwich Horror", although he did pen "History of the Necronomicon" and "Ibid" as minor works in-between,[12] as well as an account of a Halloween night's dream that he called "The Very Old Folk".

[8] In addition to being Lovecraft's personal favourite of his short stories,[12][17] critics generally consider "The Colour Out of Space" one of his best works, and the first with his trademark blending of science fiction and horror.

He also lauded the work as Lovecraft's most successful attempt to create something entirely outside of the human experience, as the entity's motive (if any) is unknown and it is impossible to discern whether or not the "colour" is emotional, moral, or even conscious.

[26] Smith considers Haller's work an imitation of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films, rather than a serious attempt to adapt Lovecraft's tale.

[24] Another adaptation, The Curse (1987), was directed by David Keith and stars Wil Wheaton, Claude Akins, Cooper Huckabee, and John Schneider.

Bloody Disgusting praised the film, stating Zuccon "managed to do the famous writer's twisted tale of unseen terror a really fair share of justice by capturing the bleak, grotesque and utterly frightening atmosphere of the source material very, very well".

[30] The 2018 film Annihilation—itself based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer—contains numerous plot similarities with Lovecraft's story, most prominently a colorful alien entity that crash lands on earth and begins mutating nearby plant and animal life.

This film stars Nicolas Cage[33][34] and Joely Richardson,[35] and was produced by Elijah Wood through his production company SpectreVision.

[36][37] Stephen King says that his 1987 novel The Tommyknockers, in which residents of a small town in rural Maine are physically and mentally affected by the emanations from an alien ship unearthed in the nearby woods, and which also features a major character named Gardner, was strongly influenced by "The Colour Out of Space".