Your favorite Lovecraft monster

[vortexgods]

<< -- I like the MI-GO, they are scientifically advanced and impressive. 

[Nick Curnow]

My favourites:
1.Azathoth. A massive, incomprehensible, idiot god thing at the center of the universe, attend to by servitors playing flutes and drums? AWESOME!! (plus my favourite design for it's servitors are from the Unspeakable Vault of Doom  )
2. The Colour. For the fact that we just have no clue what the hell it's doing!
3. Brown Jenkin. Rat + Man's face and hands = Pure creepiness...
   

[Danial]

I was positive that I had replied to this thread, but I can't find my response, so...

It's a tough decision between The Haunter of the Dark and the Mi-Go, but I'd probably lean more towards the Mi-Go purely because they are more fleshed out.

[RedRetroRobot]

I'm partial to the buried creature in The Shunned House. How its body effected the house and plantlife always left an impression on me, namely transforming the dwelling into an extension of its digestion system. The description of its elbow/skin also combines fish and corpse references and feels like a Lovecraft two-for-one. It didn't seem wholly possibly to communicate with, nor fully understand its intentions or influence beyond ultimately consuming its inhabitants.
Then again I have a big soft spot for this story. The Colour has my vote as well for the same reasons.

[Graf von Altenberg Ehrenstein]

Clearly Azathoth. Although he seems not to be ment as physical entity. All that dancing Demon Sultan stuff seems to be what superstious people make of it, like they made gods of all kinds of natural powers. While the real Azathoth is just that "monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space".
Such a cool symbol for this new worldview of the universe being ruled by mindless, careless powers.

[Inner Prop]

Bubba-hotep.

But I kid.

I think I like the races the best, Mi-go, Elder Things, Deep Ones, and Yithians. 

They approach Clarke's Law from the science side rather than the magic side, which I like better.  It's okay to SEEM like magic as long as we know it isn't, even if we could never understand the science.  I  rather that than when it is actually intended to BE magic (at least from the narrator's pov).

[Genus Unknown]

Dude, I just realized I started this thread back in 2010 and never mentioned my own favorite monster!

I have three, in the following order:

#1 and all-time heavyweight champeen, the Colour. Of all HPL's monsters, the Colour is to me the strangest and most sinister. It's a piece of strangeness from the outer cosmos, and it brings that strangeness with it, mutating the living things and worming its... essence, its unique color, into everything. It's an alien creature, it's a contagion, it's a radioactive fallout, it's a living growth, it's a vampire, it's an incorporeal phantom, it's all of the above. Most of all, it's bad news and blind, bad luck. It certainly puts a sinister spin on every shooting star I see lately.

#2 and a promising challenger for the title, Brown Jenkin. While the Colour fascinates me with its strangeness and chills me with its menace, Brown Jenkin just plain freaks me the hell out. Lovecraft dealt in a lot of "abominations," but Jenkin is the one that really deserves that title more than any other. I have a terrible fear of mice and rats anyway, but Brown Jenkin is in a league of his own. A filthy, diseased rat with human face and hands, with human (even superhuman?) intelligence and malign purpose, drinking blood and nuzzling sleepers in the night... Brown Jenkin has to be the most nauseating, skin-crawlingly horrible little abomination in all of Lovecraft. He doesn't capture my imagination the way the Colour does, but he's certainly in my mind whenever I hear a noise at night.

#3 is the race of Deep Ones. Zadok Allen describes their creepiness wonderfully: Mebbe ye’d like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea... Haow’d ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupalo a-watchin’ shapes as wa’n’t human shapes?... Shapes talkin’ sign language with their hands . . . them as had reel hands. . . .Haow’d ye like to be livin’ in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin’ an’ a-dyin’, an’ boarded-up monsters crawlin’ an’ bleatin’ an’ barkin’ an’ hoppin’ araoun’ black cellars an’ attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow’d ye like to hear the haowlin’ night arter night from the churches an’ Order o’ Dagon Hall, an’ know what’s doin’ part o’ the haowlin’?

[Inner Prop]

I don't think of the Colour as a monster.  It is the best written, most alien thing I've ever read, but not a monster.

[Genus Unknown]

Why not? It certainly seems to be a living thing by my reading.

...

Exhibit A: It moves and acts. Remember the thing that rushes past Ammi Pierce in the attic, then down the stairs to attack Nahum.

Exhibit B: It has a definite home, or lair, in the Gardner well. It makes a splashing sound when it jumps in after being seen.

Exhibit C: It draws nourishment. The strange phenomena get stronger as every other living thing on the farm gets weaker and sicklier.

Exhibit D: It grows and multiplies. Remember the end of the story, and what Ammi saw when he looked back at the Gardner farm.

Exhibit E: It communicates with those it feeds on. Remember Mrs. Gardner's mad ravings in a "terrible language that was not of earth."

...

With all that in mind, I feel pretty safe calling the Colour a living thing. And since it's a living thing, and is also extremely strange, fantastic, and sinister, it qualifies as a monster.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Has anyone here ever stopped to consider that the "Colour Out of Space" may simply be the titular reference to the colour given off by several creatures? If you go back and look at the story, it can be very easily assumed that there is more than one critter doing the feeding/killing/maddening. I'm not saying that one creature could not have been responsible, but if you assume more than one creature, it gives the story a much more sinister feel to it. My main argument for my theory is the six balls of light that Ammi sees at the end of the story. If you assume that each one was a separate entity, them you can draw the conclusion that the one that didn't make it was teh runt of the litter, and that the meteor was simply s kind of womb for them to be born from.

Just a thought.

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

It's up in the air. It could be interpreted as one creature multiplying, or multiple "seeds" buried in the meteorite that the scientists didn't find. There's definitely more than one by the end of the story, in either case.

[Inner Prop]

Oh wow.  I never thought of it that way.  Also, I guess I'm thinking of dramatizations rather than the story.  Your several points to argue its monstrosity were mostly missed by me (or not remembered).

The idea that the Colour was just the "vehicle" or the "womb" is interesting.

[JulieH]

I think more likely that the meteorite was the womb (or prison, or egg sac), and the fragile glassy spheres embedded in it were the 'seeds' or embryos.

[Vulpine]

My favorite HPL creation...probably I'll go for Cthulhu.  Just the complete...not like anything I'd read before.  Followed by a close second by the Deep Ones. 

My favorite Mythos critter though, that's Tsathoggua.  Don't ask me why, I've just always lit up when I'd read that
name (or Sadoqua, Zhothaqquah, etc). 

[Genus Unknown]

Yeah, I love the way Tsathoggua is described in "The Seven Geases." Just this huge, bloated, Jabba the Hutt-like creature that would be more than happy to eat you, but is too lazy to get up and chase you, and instead just waits in the dark for his victims to be brought to him... *shudder*