“The Last Feast of Harlequin” (1990)

Thomas Ligotti’s story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” was first published in the April
1990 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, and was reprinted in his collections
Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) and The Nightmare Factory (1996). “Harlequin,”
arguably his most famous tale—and the earliest-written of his published works—is dedicated
“To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft” (Ligotti 1994, 48).
Strongly echoing H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Festival” (1923) and “The Shadow Over
Innsmouth” (1931), Ligotti’s “Harlequin” follows the narrator, an anthropologist who
specializes in clowns, as he investigates a mid-winter festival held in Mirocaw, a strangely
lifeless town in the American Midwest. Fashioning a costume that mimics the threatening
aspect of some of the less gregarious clowns that roam the town’s streets, he discovers that
these unnerving figures transform into giant worms every year and feast on the flesh of young
local women.
While the Lovecraftian elements are explicitly indicated in the dedication,
“Harlequin” also draws on a wider tradition of American horror. Descriptions of the town as
made up of unlikely angles and skewed perspective recall both Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in
the Witch House” (1932) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), while a
poster for the state lottery calls to mind Jackson’s infamous tale of small-town horror, “The
Lottery” (1948). A scene in which the narrator follows one of the drab clowns harks back to
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), while the depictions of mindlessly
threatening townsfolk converging slowly around a horrified narrator allude both to zombie
narratives and to Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975).
Ligotti often asserts in interviews that he feels human existence is little more than
endless suffering and confusion. Many other stories in his Grimscribe collection, such as
“The Spectacles in the Drawer” and “The Dreaming in Nortown,” attempt to literalize this,
set as they are in a nightmare realm with few historical or geographical markers, a
postmodern version of E. T. A. Hoffman’s timeless fairy-tale settings. By contrast,
“Harlequin” is situated within a relatively realistic, contemporary world, rendering its horrific
revelations particularly effective.

Dara Downey

See also: The Haunting of Hill House; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian
Horror; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; ‘Salem’s Lot; Weird and Cosmic Horror
Fiction

Further Reading

Langan, John. 2007. “Thomas Ligotti’s Metafictional Mapping: The Allegory of ‘The Last
Feast of Harlequin.” Lovecraft Annual 1: 126-44.

Ligotti, Thomas. 1994. Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. New York: Jove.

Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations. Holicong:
Wildside, 2003.