John Pelan is an acclaimed author whose fiction includes the Lovecraftian novella The Colour out of Darkness. He is the editor of such groundbreaking anthologies as Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium, The Devil Is Not Mocked, and The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique. His solo stories have appeared in publications such as The Urbanite, Gothic.net, Enigmatic Tales, and Carpe Noctem. He is the founder of the publishing house Darkside Press, and cofounder of Midnight House. He lives in Seattle.

The Colour Out of Darkness
by John Pelan

In his classic story "The Call of Cthulhu" H.P. Lovecraft wrote: "The cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

Lovecraft was right, though he only glimpsed a tiny sliver of the true horror that governs the secret history of the world. The truth is much, much worse as several young people are about to discover. The miracle drug "Essence" opens doors of perception hitherto undreamed of, but there's a heavy price to paid. The price is to belong body and soul to nameless horrors that were old when the earth was young. Nobody rides for free, and damn few get out alive…