Who Goes There?

In the “canon” of great horror writers, you come across the same names: Lovecraft, Poe, King, and so on. This is a canon that has not, as far as I can tell, changed fundamentally in the past two decades; but then one can say that’s only the case if we’re talking horror at novel length. Since the market for horror novels exploded in the ’70s, there’s been the odd side effect that those who tapped that market then largely remain the faces of horror literature. When it comes to short fiction, though, the genre has been ever growing, ever evolving, if also blocked off from mainstream appeal in such a mode. (Novels sell far more than short stories, and sadly always will.) One of the modern masters of the short horror story is Thomas Ligotti, who has deliberately avoided writing a horror novel, as he believes (I think rightly) that the horrific strikes best in short bursts.

Ligotti debuted back in the early ’80s and picked up quite a bit of atttention from horror connoisseurs with his first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The stories contained therein were eerie and often disturbing, but by way of implication rather than on-page violence. In a way his style can be said to complement Clive Barker’s, who also hit the horror scene around the same time; but whereas Barker tapped into the gruesome potential of the human body, Ligotti begs us to avert our gaze. Overtly a student of Lovecraft, Ligotti’s writing at its best captures a perverted wonderment—an awe of outside forces that compels more than it frights. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” itself is apparently set in the Cthulhu mythos, and fans of Lovecraft will find it in some ways familiar.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s since been reprinted fairly often, first in the Ligotti collections Grimscribe, The Nightmare Factory, and The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, and then a ton of anthology appearances. There’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), Best New Horror 2 (ed. Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones), American Gothic Tales (ed. Joyce Carol Oates), and perhaps biggest of all, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (ed. Peter Straub).

Enhancing Image

This is not a story to read if you hate clowns.

The unnamed narrator is an anthropologist who specializes in the study of clowns across different cultural contexts; this is in no small part due to the narrator having a real soft spot for clowns himself, to the point of thinking of himself as one. “To me the title of Clown has always carried connotations of a noble sort. I was an adroit jester, strangely enough, and had always taken pride in the skills I worked so diligently to develop.” This is foreshadowing for how he will get involved in the—let’s not say conflict, but the spectacle of the story. Hungry for events involving clowns, preferably off the beaten path, the narrator is informed by a colleague that there’s a town in the Midwest, Mirocaw, which has a yearly “Fool’s Feast” with clowns as part of the main attraction. We’re never told what state Mirocaw is in, nor are we even told when the story takes place; you might assume it’s set in “modern day,” i.e., the 1980s, but the narrator’s mannered style of narrating suggets a more antiquated period. Maybe. It’s ambiguous.

Having arrived in Mirocaw, the narrator asks for directions and some info on the town’s culture, first an old man who promptly ignores him and then an older woman who is of some help but who also says some rather ominous things about the festival. There are a few oddities. For one, the festival is set to take place form December 19 to the 21st, coinciding with the leadup to Christmas, which the narrator points out as being weirdly timed since the Fool’s Feast has seemingly nothing to do with Christmas. “It’s just tradition,” the woman says. Despite the supposed age of the festival, the narrator is only able to find one scholarly article on the proceedings—one which happens to be written by a former professor of his, Raymond Thoss. Thoss was a real eccentric who had inspired the narrator to pursue his studies in his own way, but who had seemingly vanished without a trace some twenty years ago, having wanted to write a book on the town but never finishing it. The narrator gets to thinking, however, that the old man who had ignored him earlier may be Thoss, who, if this turns out to be the case, has been living in Mirocaw for the past two decades.

Slowly but surely we get a buildup of mystery, helped by the fact that Ligotti’s is being willfully obtuse about some details. Apparently not wanting to date his story, the only impressions of time that we’re given are the date of the festival, and the time span of twenty years, something which shows up, eerily, more than once. Thoss disappeared twenty years ago, but around that same time there was another disappearance in Mirocaw. Every year, around Christmastime, there’s at least one suicide in town, with a nearby lake being a popular location. Elizabeth Beadle, wife of hotel owner Samuel Beadle, had vanished twenty years ago; she’s presumed to have been a suicide, but her body was never found. The narrator, not long after reading about this bit of town lore, encounters Sarah, Elizabeth’s daughter (likely barely out of her teens), who bares a striking resemblance with her mother. For my money this is the most effective scene in the story, it being a Vertigo-esque moment of time seemingly having repeated itself, and it alludes to something else that will be a repeat of a past horror.

Since we’re this far in I may as well elaborate on a few points. The first is that Ligotti plays into phobias of clowns, worms, and Midwesterners here, and I have to say that, at least as an adult, I don’t find those first two to be scary. I was interested in the mystery surrounding the origins of the festival, Thoss’s disappearance, and the connection that Elizabeth and Sarah might have with the town’s traditions, but I was not put off by the clown imagery. Of course the inhabitants of Mirocaw themselves, whom the narrator describes as ” the probable descendants in a direct line from some enterprising pack of New Englanders of the past century” are uncanny by virtue of their behavior and how they’re disconnected from the rest of civilization. If Ligotti does anything really well here it’s to evoke a sense of isolation, in which we’re cut off from the world, from humanity, and even from our own sense of time. The narrator himself is a bit of an uncanny figure, being someone without any social life outside of academia, seemingly without normal human interests, who thinks himself a jester without a court.

Another thing, and this is important: “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is long as shit. It’s not a narrative you’d think would be this long, because while there is a bit of a plot, there’s virtually no conflict, nor are there characters in the conventional sense. I’ve read that Ligotti had written the first draft for this story back at the beginning of his career, when he was trying to figure out his own voice as a writer, and while he had revised it drastically over the years there’s still the germ of a Lovecraft pastiche, including one or two of Lovecraft’s shortcomings—namely his tendency to use three words when one would do the trick. Now you may be thinking, “Brian (you handsome devil), how can you praise Clark Ashton Smith’s immense verbosity but treat Lovecraft’s similar style as hit-or-miss?” For one, Smith was the better poet, by a considerable margin; nobody writing weird fiction at that time evoked the weird through sheer language like he did, except maybe C. L. Moore on a good day. Another thing is that Smith’s protagonits tend to be active players in their stories—explorers, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—while Lovecraft’s protagonists tend to be bookish observers.

The narrator for “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is very much an observer in the Lovecraft mode: he sees things happen, and may inquire about these happenings, but his actions are more or less negligible. I’ll explain more in the spoilers section, but even when the narrator decides to act, his actions fail to alter the series of events he has stumbled upon. Frankly I tend to find such protagonists boring. It doesn’t help that, in keeping with the Lovecraft influence, the narrator is verbose but often not poetic, which only makes sense since he’s an academic. Having gone through academia, and as someone who hopes to attend graduate school in a couple years or so, I can say that academics, by and large, are terrible writers who have no ear for the English language. Ligotti is a much better writer than the man narrating his story, such that he’s able to sneak in some effective allusions, an example being when the narrator enters a shabby diner and sees a bunch of people coming out “in a wormlike mass.” Which brings us to…

There Be Spoilers Here

The day of the festival has come, and the narrator has decided to play a part in the festivities. Being a clown himself, he tries to look the part, modeling his makeup after Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He joins a gathering of people in the streets and follows them down a down cavern, which itself leads to an underground lair, where a part of the festival is to take place. It’s here that the narrator, who had seen Thoss a couple times before but had not been able to confirm these suspicions, finally realizes that not only has Thoss been living in Mirocaw for the past twenty years, but has long since taken a hands-on approach with the festivities. This is another case of history repeating itself: both men came to the town to observe an obcure cultural event, only to become active participants—”going native,” to use an old saying. Of course, Thoss is not a cult leader but merely playing into a tradition that is possibly a couple centuries old at this point.

Now, you may notice that so far nothing supernatural has happened. There have been some strange happening, but nothing that strictly defies the laws of nature. It’s here that we’re treated to a grotessque transformation scene (I don’t know if I like that the cover for this issue illustrates this or not), in which the gatherers at the sacrifice (for that’s what it turns out to be) transform into monstrous worms with gaping mouths. “Individual members of the congregation would gaze emptily—caught for a moment in a frozen trance—and then collapse to the floor to begin the sickening metamorphosis.” They gather around the woman on the alter—Sarah Beadle, probably lying on the same slab as her mother did twenty years prior. They probably devour her, but we don’t see it; the narrator, naturally in horror, runs out of the tunnel, Thoss and his people allowing him to escape. At the very end we’re told that Thoss let the narrator go because, according to Thoss, “He is one of us. […] He was always one of us.”

I’m indifferent to the climax. It could be that I had read a Cthulhu mythos story not too long ago that had a similar structure, with even a similar climactic event, but it was handled in a very different way; I am of course referring to Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone” (review here). While he was not as refined a wordsmith as Ligotti or even Lovecraft, I think Howard managed to beat both at the cosmic horror game in that instance, and with less than half this story’s word count. When I got to the end of “The Last Feast of Harlequin” I felt like I had eaten a meal at a very fine independently owned restaurant that was clearly made with love and which had just the right amount of seasoning—but the portions were all wrong. I came out of it feeling weirdly undernourished.

A Step Farther Out

I had conflicting feelings while reading this one. I didn’t find anything blatantly wrong with it, and yet I was left feeling unfulfilled. Part of it is the length: this is a long novelette clocking in 15,000 words or so, and I don’t think that length is justified. Another is that I was hoping, deep down, that the climax would be more than what it ended up being. This is a story that evokes intrigue well, but then fails to provide a satisfying payoff, the answer we’re given being not only too easy but one that’s been done before. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is one of Ligotti’s longest stories, and it was also his pro zine debut (having only appeared in semi-pros up to that point), so for some readerss this was their introduction to Ligotti’s talents. Having read a few of his stories beforehand, I’m aware that he’s done better—that he can be more chilling and idiosyncratic than this.

Happy Halloween. See you next time.