ABSTRACT
This chapter reads the colour as an inhuman agency that lacks obvious motivation, but is nevertheless unparalleled in its destructive capabilities, comparable in regard to both: the real-world phenomenon of radiation and radioactivity. Part one of my reading establishes a key aspect of the colour-radiation comparison: that both are motiveless inhuman agencies acting in similar ways, especially when acting upon organic bodies. This is demonstrated through the colour’s degenerative effects on all members of the Gardner family, effects that mirror the aftermath of prolonged exposure to radionuclides on organic bodies. In the second part, I address “The Colour Out of Space” with an expanded nuclear context—including the lived-in anxieties shaping domestic nuclear policy in the present. Drawing on the past traumas and consequences of our tainted nuclear legacies reinforces my reading of radioactivity as the nuclear weird. Part two collates the fictional Gardner experience with the nuclear weird, bringing to the fore old and new concerns about the dread possibility of radioactive contamination into public and private life. This weirding of the nuclear relocates the sites of cosmic horror in the twenty-first century away from the void and into our own communities, and often our own backyards.
