H.P. Lovecraft's horror story, rendered in chilling detail by modern manga horror master Gou Tanabe! The complete story in one volume, featuring a tip-in title page in metallic gold ink and four pages in color.
Even the folk of Arkham are frightened of a valley west of town...blighted and deformed by
something that fell from space--a twisting, spectral hue.
In 1927, a surveyor examining a site for a new reservoir arrives at the bottom of a desolate valley in rural Massachusetts...a place spoken of in fear, even by the inhabitants of witch-haunted Arkham--for in the past, they say, there were "strange days" there.
The surrounding landscape is weirdly tangled and overgrown, but at the very center of the isolation are five acres where nothing lives and nothing remains, but a fine gray ash unstirred by the wind. What turned this farmland into a sterile, blasted heath? It happened long ago, the visitor learns from aged survivor Ammi Pierce, when in 1882 a visitor fell out of a clear blue sky, trailing smoke like a dragon.
Soon scientists from Miskatonic University arrived at Nahum Gardner's farm, where the meteorite landed--if indeed it was a meteorite, for the strangely plastic object refused to cool after its descent, seemed to gradually shrink, and in the laboratory, samples of it faded away slowly into nothingness. But not before revealing under analysis strange, shining radiance, unlike any known element of the spectrum.
What had been a mystery to the professors gradually becomes a horror for the Gardner family as first, bizarre lightning disintegrates what remains of the cosmic visitor, and then their crops begin to come in strangely--fruits big and bountiful, but bitter and repugnant to eat. Then the unnatural blight spreads to the animals...and finally, to the minds and bodies of the Gardners...twisted by the colour out of space.
"I love H.P. Lovecraft...It would be great to adapt him as a serialized manga, but I actually saw Gou Tanabe create a great adaption of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. Afterwards, I ended up not doing it because I thought I wouldn't be as good as Gou's version."--Junji Ito (
Uzumaki, Black Paradox)
Gou Tanabe was born in 1975 in Tokyo. As a child, he became a fan of yokai (supernatural creatures from Japanese tradition) when his father bought him Shigeru Mizuki's classic manga GeGeGe no Kitaro, and by junior high he was already designing his own demons in sketchbooks. An encounter with the work of creature modeler Yasushi Nirasawa in Hobby Japan magazine started Tanabe's interest in horror movies and the special effects behind them as well.
Tanabe began his professional manga career with a short stint working as an assistant, but made his solo debut in 2003 with
Sunakichi, published in
Comic Beam magazine; the story won the magazine's New Faces Award, and Tanabe would soon become associated with
Comic Beam, which began to regularly feature his Lovecraft manga staring in 2007 with an adaptation of the short story "The Outsider."
In addition to receiving nominations for three Eisner Awards and two Harvey Awards to date, Gou Tanabe has received critical acclaim in France, winning the prestigious Best Series award in 2020 at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, as well as in his native Japan with a Jury Selection Award at the 2018 Japan Media Arts Festival.
