“The Last Feast of Harlequin” (1990)

This long story by Thomas Ligotti is his Cthulhu story, more or less, and a very good one, with humor and unsettling details and setting. The mysterious town of Mirocaw (which keeps sounding in my head like a derangement of “miracle”), somewhere in the Midwest, holds an annual winter solstice event. Our first-person narrator is an academic whose specialty is the anthropology of clowns. Much of the humor here depends on his fascination with clowns. Not only does he study them but he dresses up as one every chance he gets. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is not only dedicated to “the memory of H.P. Lovecraft” but also looks to a Lovecraft story for inspiration, “The Festival,” which also takes place at the winter solstice and mirrors other details found here. Our guy is mindful, of course, that the winter solstice is also the Christmas season. The contrast is one of the things that makes this story work so well. The town is all decked out in decorations, but they are slightly off. All the festive lights, for example, are only green. It’s a chaotic party scene on the streets, like a Mardi Gras, with strange parades and most people dressed in costumes and masks. Some of the costumes suggest social divisions in the town. One, usually coming from the poor side of town, look like the figure in the painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. Our guy can’t really get anyone to talk to him and explain what’s going on. He decides to dress like the Scream folks and go mix and mingle. There’s an ongoing parade with floats and a marching band. As he wanders about, he notices a pickup truck cruising along collecting the Scream revelers. It stops for him and he climbs in back with the rest. I really wanted to tell him not to do this. What follows is, again, much like Lovecraft’s “Festival” story, but Ligotti folds in more layers of meaning. There’s a professor who was highly influential on our guy, and it’s surprising and ominous to find him there, not least because he disappeared many years earlier and now seems to be running the show here. The story is not perfect, not without flaws, but it grabs on and never lets you go. The narrator is always interesting and makes suspension of disbelief easy, which is good because this story gets to some intense and crazy places.

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Listen to story online.