The narrator of this 1927 story is a surveyor, taking measurements for a new reservoir. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glimpse of sunlight.Īt Halloween, what reader could resist turning the page? West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. Just consider the story's opening sentences: It's here, and to the economically but indelibly drawn landscape of 'The Colour Out of Space', that I most often return, especially at this time of year. But supreme within Lovecraft's work is his own invented corner of New England, Arkham (based on Salem and 'full of witch legends') and the surrounding Miskatonic Valley. In 'The Whisperer in Darkness', the evocation of rural Vermont's 'unfrequented hills' and lonely farmhouses are the story's highlight. The vast wastes and visibly ancient geology of Antarctica are fundamental to Lovecraft's long story 'At the Mountains of Madness'. In his best stories, his descriptions of landscape are so meticulous that their woods and valleys are loaded with menace long before anything shambles or crawls through them. HP Lovecraft, the American writer who, in a flurry of activity in the mid-1920s, defined the ' Cthulhu Mythos' – a series of interconnected stories that Luc Sante has called 'a sort of unified field theory of horror' – is particularly good at this. From the deserted strands of MR James to the Danube of Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows', there seems to be a deeper resonance to those stories in which location is a junction between the mundane and the weird.

In my favourite works of horror and supernatural fiction, the landscape itself is at least as important as whatever beasts or phantoms may roam across it.

The colour out of space pages