Being one of the most bleak and tense of Lovecraft's stories, you can bet there are plenty of disturbing imagery to go around.
The Short Story
- The fate of the Gardner family is possibly one of the scariest things Lovecraft ever wrote. They and their farm are slowly devoured by an Eldritch Abomination that alters their minds to keep them from leaving and eventually drives them all completely insane, all while it literally drains the life out of every organism living there. The end result is that its prey, including the Gardners, become gray, brittle, and prone to crumbling, remaining alive and aware until they disintegrate under their own weight.
- Lovecraft himself almost certainly wouldn't have known this when he originally wrote the story, if ever in his lifetime, but the effects that the colour-out-of-space has on the Gardner farm and those around it—at least at first—sounds an awful lot like what a later audience might recognize as radiation poisoning instead, slowly killing everything in the area and mutating anything that can't or doesn't leave, adding an extra, somewhat more realistic level to the horror of what it does to the Gardners.
- The moving trees at the climax were seriously disturbing. They're a prime example of Lovecraft's "just fundamentally wrong" sense of horror."And yet amid that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness."
- Just everything that Ammie has to go through during and after him checking on the Gardeners for the last time. That the man is still able to properly tell about it instead of turning into a blubbering madman is close to a miracle. The fact that the narrator implies he is close to dying just like the Gardeners did only makes it worse, considering he will suffer horribly for trying to help his friend once too often.
- The blasted heath. It's a five-acre patch of gray dust that is utterly devoid of all life, even forty-four years after the Colour's arrival. And it's slowly growing, because part of the Colour is still there, feeding. And the area is later used as a reservoir for drinking water.
- For extra points? The reservoir project in the story was a real thing, which did require several small towns to be evacuated and flooded. At least we can be sure that's all that's down there, right?
