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Literature: The Colour Out of Space

A story by H. P. Lovecraft inspired by Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder" (from the novel The Three Imposters). The story is first told from the perspective of a property investigator visiting the town of Arkham who is citing for a new reservoir to be built. Eventually he starts asking about the mysterious "blasted heath" which the people had been trying to avoid talking about for the entire time. Eventually he finds Ammi, an old man living near the heath, who is willing to explain what happened there and why absolutely nothing can live on that burgeoning plot of land...

The story then shifts perspective to Ammi who tells about how the Gardner family found a meteor that had crashed to earth one night and the horrific things that arose because of that.

The story is one of several of Lovecraft's that received an audio drama adaptation from the Atlanta Radio Theater Company.

And yes, it was an inspiration for Maniac Mansion.

Can be read here.

Provides Examples Of

Asshole Victim: Very much averted. The Gardners are nothing but upstanding normal people, making their horrible fate that much worse.
- Played somewhat straight in the Atlanta Radio Theater Company's audio drama version, where Nahum is a rather cantankerous, unpleasant man whose first response to most problems is to reach for his shotgun.
Body Horror: The fate of the Colour's victims.
Driven to Suicide: The Gardner children both kill themselves rather than suffer the fate that befell their mother.
- One of them anyway; the other one's bones were found in the well where the Colour dwells, so he may have become a victim to it, as well.
Eldritch Abomination: The titular Colour is a particularly creepy example because its nature is never discerned - only its effects, vis-a-vis Ammi's tale and the nature of the heath itself.
Eldritch Location: The Blasted Heath is a slowly, inexorably expanding area that is completely and totally dead. Nothing lives there - nothing, not even germs or mold. It is a place of rock, dust, and ash.
Epileptic Trees: Literally: the trees were described as swaying epileptically.
And yet amid that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness.
Fisher Kingdom: A meteorite containing a substance of a color and an element unknown to man has landed in the well of a farmhouse. The soil around the well begins to change and a malaise radiates outward, in which all animal, plant, and human life begins to deform and mutate, taking on the color of the meteorite and eventually turning gray and crumbling into dust.
- And Nahum's story implies that people can't bring themselves to leave the area, even after they grasp that something horrible is happening.
Lovecraft Country: The story was written by the Trope Namer.
Madwoman in the Attic: Nahum's wife suffers this fate when she goes mad.
- As does one of his sons.
Promoted to Love Interest: A romantic subplot is introduced in the radio version between Ammi Pearce and Mrs. Gardner. According to this version they were briefly involved before she got married and she later tries to seduce him again so he'll take her away from Nahum Gardner's irradiated lands before she succumbs to the effects of The Colour.
Starfish Aliens: The Colour. This was Invoked by Lovecraft, who didn't like how human-like aliens were in other works of his time.
Vampiric Draining: The Colour seems to drain Life Energy from its victims until they're nothing but grey ash.
You Cannot Grasp the True Form: In a variation of this trope, the titular "colour" is unlike any color in the normal spectrum, which under conventional (but obviously non-applicable here) logic would suggest it simply being invisible.
- It was stated that a "colour" is the closest thing that it can be compared to.