Today’s cocktail is based on a story written by one of the greatest horror writers in history. A man whose life was as terrifying as his tales. Someone who could take something as familiar as color and turn it into the stuff of nightmares.
Today I have crafted a drink based on the story The Colour Out of Space. The shot consists of two ingredients: Bailey’s Irish Cream and the ever-infamous Absinthe, whose dramatic legacy makes me think it should almost be said in a whisper.
I discovered Lovecraft watching a video on Youtube and I was hooked the moment I bought a book with a collection of his best stories. His use of language was on another level. I couldn’t stop reading his work, even though some of his stories sent shivers running up and down my spine.
While I was reading The Colour Out of Space, a story about an alien that causes a blight and tremendous other horrors on a single homestead, I came across this quote:
“…that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well– seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.”
Is there a better way to describe that horror, that… thing, something so alien?
When Lovecraft was writing this from his home in Providence, Rhode Island, he noticed that writers tended to humanize aliens in their sci-fi tales and he wanted to create something truly alien. He also drew a tremendous amount of inspiration from Hugh Elliot’s Modern Science and Materialism, published in 1919, which mentioned the limitations of the human senses, such as all the colors outside the visible spectrum.
After reading the story, I was amazed how Lovecraft was able to take a color and make it terrifying. I knew I wanted to make a drink that, to some degree, could depict something close to what he described the color to be. This is my best attempt at creating a drink that had that undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison.
The Bailey’s light beige reminded me of the blight and the Absinthe, with its stark green coloration, showed off that luminous amorphousness which shined from the well. If this were the early 1900s, temperance movement members in France would have you believe that the Absinthe would push you into madness, much like the alien from The Colour Out of Space. It won’t but, but the story behind those claims is fascinating. Watch the Last Call at the end of today’s episode to learn out more.
For me, this drink is like reading Lovecraft. You enter the dreadful maddening world that hits you in the face much like the Absinthe, and as you keep drinking, you are met with the sweet satisfaction of tremendous storytelling that has you wanting to come back for more.
The next time you open a book authored by Lovecraft, take a shot of this drink, and enter the warped and demented world of one of America’s most talented storytellers.
