The Last Feast of Harlequin

by Thomas Ligotti

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" is a novella about an anthropologist studying clown festivals. While investigating a particularly odd one, previously the object of study by his former mentor who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the narrator discovers the monstrous truth behind the town of Mirocaw and its bizarre traditions...

In the observation of H. P. Lovecraft scholar and biographer S. T. Joshi, Ligotti's fascinating story "may perhaps be the very best homage to Lovecraft ever written."

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Lovecraftian

34 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings, while unique in style, have been noted as major continuations of several literary genres—most prominently Lovecraftian horror—and have overall been described as works of "philosophical horror", often written as philosophical novels with a "darker" undertone which is similar to gothic fiction. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

The Last Feast of Harlequin - weird, dark fiction brought to literary perfection by master of the craft Thomas Ligotti., a tale the author dedicated to the memory of H.P. Lovecraft.

Here's how Ligotti frames his story: the unnamed narrator, an anthropologist and college instructor with both scholarly and personal interest in clowns, tells us clowns and clowning go well beyond traditional notions of a circus, how clowns have performed many functions and roles in various cultures around the world.

Therefore, to both experience great self-satisfaction and further his own academic research, the narrator cherishes opportunities to participate in festivals as a clown himself. When he learns of a little-publicized festival with clowns in the Midwestern town of Mirocaw, his interest is piqued.

In late summer the opportunity presents itself to make a side trip to Mirocaw and he takes it. Right from the start, things seem peculiarly out of sync – the various parts of the town do not appear to fit together; the steep roofs of the houses behind the town’s main street, due to the hilly terrain, strike him as floating in air at odd angles. Indeed, he compares the entire town to an album of snapshots where the camera has been continually jostled that results in page after page of crooked photos.

Rolling down his car window to ask directions to the town hall from a shabbily dressed old man who looks vaguely familiar, he is greeted by a distant, imbecilic gaze. And after finally arriving at the building and making inquiries about the festival, he is handed a cheap copy of a flyer and learns the festival is December 19-21 and there are “clowns of a sort.”

If all this sounds creepy, even sinister, that’s exactly what the narrator feels, however, he continues to explore this most unusual town and vows to return with his clown costume for the December festival.

At this point, the narrator tells us how his former anthropology teacher, one Dr. Raymond Thoss, wrote a paper entitled The Last Feast of Harlequin with references to Syrian Gnostics who called themselves Saturnians. He also tells us that he now knows why that shabby man on the street looked familiar – he was none other than Raymond Thoss. The thick plottens.

Once back in Mirocaw, things turn very weird very quickly. He discovers, among other disturbing facts, this festival features two sets of clowns: more traditional clowns chosen from the townspeople that are, to his astonishment, picked on and pushed around as they walk the streets and a second group of clowns, shabbily dressed, gaunt, with faces painted white and mouths wide in terror, bringing to mind the famous painting by Edvard Munch.

Upon reflection, he now understands he is witnessing two festivals, a festival within a festival. Returning to his hotel, he makes the decision to dress up as one of those shabby, gaunt, wide-mouthed clowns. Events then take even weirder and much more frightening twists. Not a reading experience for the fainthearted.

Shifting to the philosophic, much of what happens in the concluding sections of this sixty page novella seems to revolve around Gnostic myth. What's particularly strange with Thoss and the others and the subterranean ritual the narrator witnesses is all these Mirocaw folk appear to take a Gnostic myth literally.

Such literal interpretation of Gnostic myth is ironic (to put it politely) since the ancient Gnostics were all about symbols and constructed complex mythologies to prevent attempts to reduce religion to literal interpretations. Incidentally, this is exactly the point emphasized by Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller, leading scholar of Gnosticism.

I first read The Last Feast of the Harlequin some thirty years ago and the strange happenings and images from this tale might qualify as among the most powerful I've encountered within the genre of horror fiction. Again, not a story for the fainthearted.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's something mesmerizing about Ligotti's grimly evocative prose, despite the run on sentences and the detached Lovecraft-esqe style narration. As in many a Lovecraft tale, we have an academic observer drawn into a series of strange phenomena in a mysterious, isolated rural town, often reading from his notes or recalling past events. The use of clowns as an initial focus feels more hokey and cliche than chilling. As the story progresses this clown motif, a red herring in retrospect, takes a backseat to more eldritch and cosmic horrors.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

DAS LETZTE FEST DES HARLEKINS
(THE LAST FEAST OF HARLEQUIN; Erstveröffentlichung 4/1990 im Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazin); deutsche Übersetzung von Joannis Stefanidis

Ich bin der festen Überzeugung, dass eine Review nicht allzu sehr von der Erwartungshaltung des Rezensenten bestimmt sein sollte, denn warum sollte ein Text für falsche Ansprüche haftbar gemacht werden? Manchmal fällt es allerdings schwer, sich von seinen Erwartungen zu distanzieren.
Ligotti also, und DAS LETZTE FEST, eine seiner gerühmtesten Erzählungen; S.T. Joshi sagt darüber: "Vielleicht die beste Hommage an Lovecraft, die je geschrieben wurde." Und tatsächlich widmet Ligotti sie HPL: “To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft”. Unschwer ist erkennbar, dass sich die Erzählung stark anlehnt an Schatten über Innsmouth. Ich ringe immer noch mit HPL, da neben seinen Stärken mich auch vieles irritiert und gelegentlich ärgert. Bei den meisten Pastiches, die ich bislang gelesen habe, werden mir aber HPLs schriftstellerische Qualitäten deutlich. So geht es mir auch hier: Ich bin nicht der Meinung, dass DAS LETZTE FEST mit SCHATTEN konkurrieren kann.
Auf Amazon schrieb ein Rezensent, Ligottis Stil sei "eine Mischung zwischen Kafka und Lovecraft". Auch für diesen Blödsinn kann Ligottis natürlich nichts, aber dass er sprachlich gelobt wird, habe ich schon häufiger gelesen. Ich müsste die Story nochmal im Original lesen und Vergleiche anstellen, aber zumindest in der Übersetzung von Stefanidis wirkt manches eigenwillig und holperig. Wer Ligottis Stil mit Kafka vergleicht, hat entweder niemals eine Zeile von Kafka gelesen oder leidet unter grauenhafter Urteilsschwäche.
Das alles soll nun nicht heißen, dass DAS LETZTE FEST DES HARLEKINS eine verzweifelt schlechte Erzählung ist, denn das gewiss nicht der Fall. Dass es sich aber um ein Meisterwerk fantastischer Literatur handeln soll, erschließt sich mir beim ersten Lesen nicht.
Eng angelehnt an HPL ist die Story klassischer Kleinstadthorror. Ein Universitätsprofessor (Professoren oder Privatgelehrte müssen es schon sein, unter dem tun es viele Horrorautoren nicht) besucht die amerikanische Kleinstadt Mirocaw aus anthropologischem Interesse, um popkulturelle Beobachtungen anzustellen. Er trifft aber nicht nur auf Weihnachtsmänner und Clowns, sondern auf einen Kult, der die Auslöschung des Individuums zelebriert.
Während HPLs Story sich nach dem erzählerischen Höhepunkt noch lange hinzieht, fällt die Schilderung des Schreckens beim Zeremoniell bei Ligotti extrem knapp aus. Hier liegt die Stärke in den Andeutungen und der Stimmung, die dem Grauen vorausgehen.
DAS LETZTE FEST hat, ich muss es so sagen, meine Erwartungen ein wenig enttäuscht.

[Zac Hawkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

In simple terms?

The finest modern work of weird fiction I have yet read.
Ligotti is a freaking mastermind.

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not so much a Christmas read as a Yuletide one. Ligotti turns the Lovecraftian elements up to 11, sending a university professor to investigate the winter solstice goings-on of a strange town populated by strange people. To make it extra scary the pagan locals enjoy dressing up as clowns.

"They were singing to the “unborn in paradise,” to the “pure unlived lives.” They sang a dirge for existence, for all its vital forms and seasons. Their ideal was a melancholy half-existence consecrated to all the many shapes of death and dissolution. A sea of thin, bloodless faces trembled and screamed their antipathy to being itself."

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Please Come to the Fun, it said in large letters. Parades, it went on, Street Masquerade, Bands, The Winter Raffle, and The Coronation of the Winter Queen.”

“What buries itself before it is dead?”

An annual festival in the town of Mirocaw an anthropologist and scholar will be amidst on a project researching the significance of clowns in diverse cultural contexts.
Our unammed protagonist is one that has an affliction of seasonal despair and with varying complexities, a dark malady and melancholiness, he will traverse mysteriousness in the new terrain and discoveries.

There was once a professor Thoss who was a teacher of the anthropologist, he had a certain greater deeper knowledge that he did not seek to impart in his teachings, of which one anthropologist knew he possessed and hoped in time will reveal but had not published anything for twenty years since his leaving of the academic circle. He was the one that set him on this inquisition.

There were signs of this being a town to not enter, the empty hotel in Townshend where he took residency of and welcomed by a woman that resembles one dead twenty years, there was the “frail stores” and “starved-looking houses” as he entered the town the “gaunt faces of pedestrians,” despite even knowing of the seasonal holiday suicides and pagan ritual aspects of the festival that Dr. Thoss mentioned in his article on the festival.

A town where ghetto clowns and oval-mouthed pallid clowns roam, a sense something more archaic afoot, he must find some answers, he finds small feelings of mania and purpose in all his complexities and thus forth acts on taking up of a gruesome clown disguise for further enquiries and investigations in the festival within the festival, what follows he may run or be satiated on a solstice night an “apex of darkness.”

An insidious uncanny tale with a malevolent metamorphosis unraveling in this scientific perilous sojourn in a town with a festival with morbid souls and oval-mouthed pallid clowns.
First person narration with visceral and vivid prose psychological imbuing, hypnotic reading onwards to its finality and afterwards with ruminations on truths behind the masks.
Herein lays forth a cheerless jester in all the formations of disorder of the world.


Names and aspects contained:

Unnamed anthropologist
Dr Raymond Thoss
Elizabeth Beadle
Samuel Beadle hotel owner in Mirocaw

Cambridge Massachusetts
Anthropology
Clowns
Town Mirocaw
Festival
A greater deeper knowledge
Harlequin article
Suspect Holiday suicides
Gaunt pedestrians
Frail stores
Starved-looking houses
Adopted Yuletide customs
Pagan aspect to festival
Townshed hotel
Tramp-like figures
The Winter Queen
Ghetto clowns
Oval-mouthed Pallid clowns
Pure ones


This was part of a selected connected set of terrifying and creepy tales on my webpage with excerpts at :
https://www.more2read.com/review/a-fe...

[Mackenzie Clevenger · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.0 - the thing I liked most about this novella was the writing style, but especially since I’m now familiar with some of Ligotti’s other stories, this one just felt too much like someone else’s. It’s obviously heavily inspired by Lovecraft, but so much so that it feels like his own retelling of “A Shadow Over Innsmouth” and not like its own unique story. Ligotti has such an interesting writing style in his own right, and I would’ve liked to have seen that personal style come through in the story when really it just felt completely Lovecraft. However, as usual with Ligotti, the ambiance and atmosphere were expertly done and I especially liked the uncanny focus on clowns rather than a murderous focus which, to me, seems more common. I was also somewhat surprised Ligotti’s worldview didn’t make as strong of an appearance as it does in his other work—I think that’s something that could’ve added an interesting spin or new aspect onto this story.

[Peter Ellermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best things I've ever read, and it's horror is still creeping in on me from behind.

[isha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 just a clown anthropologist and his seasonal affective disorder. buildup was fun but conclusion felt lacking.

[Guillermo Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

El Último Festín de Arlequín" o La última fiesta del Arlequín" apareció por primera vez en el número de abril de 1990 de Fantasy and Science-Fiction y llegó a la lista de finalistas del Premio Mundial de Fantasía a la mejor obra de ficción corta, así como a la antología "Mejor de Datlow y Windling Year" y a la antología " Mejor Nuevo Horror 2" , editada por Ramsay Campbell y Stephen Jones. Desde entonces, la historia ha sido incluida en antologías en nada menos que diecisiete ocasiones, lo que demuestra no solo su popularidad, sino también su estatus canónico. Esto no es sorprendente, ya que "El Último Festín de Arlequín" o "La última fiesta del Arlequín" es una historia increíblemente poderosa y admirablemente accesible.

Un narrador anónimo, antropólogo social, oye hablar de Mirocaw (una pequeña ciudad de los Estados Unidos) por primera vez a través de un colega que conoce su interés por los payasos como fenómeno cultural. Al parecer, este pueblo del Medio Oeste celebra anualmente una "Fiesta previa a la Navidad" en la que los payasos tienen una participación destacada. El narrador no solo estudia estas cosas, sino que se enorgullece de ser un "bufón hábil".

Así, nuestro protagonista decide ir al pueblo, con la intención de ser parte de esa fiestas, pero desde el inicio la ciudad se vuelven extrañas, puesto que, simplemente el acceder al pueblo es algo raro y confuso por decir lo menos, y algunos de sus habitantes son extrañamente oscuros y uraños.

Nuestro protagonista se quedará en el pueblo los días de fiestas, pero lo que descubrirás no será propiamente lo que esperaba ver.

Con fuertes influencias del maestro H.P. Lovecraft este cuento corto me recuerda mucho a la icónica narración de "La sombra sobre Innsmuouth" pues sus similitudes son evidentes.

Un protagonista que acude a un pueblo con notable curiosidad sobre cosas que pasan en el lugar.
Un pueblo en el que sus habitantes son algunos extraños, retraídos y siniestros, con tendencia a realizar ciertos rituales místicos, oscuros y paganos, al parecer ancestrales y con un borroso pasado que queda oculto en tiempos olvidados.

Durante su estancia en el lugar le suceden cosas fuera de lo común, a la cuales, pretende encontrarles una respuesta lógica, pero conforme pasan cosas, ello se vuelve insostenible.

Nuestro narrador al igual que en el relato de Innsmuouth, tiene en su ser, una especie de condición personal que lo liga al lugar o a los lugareños, la cual será determinante al final del relato.

Aunque narrada con su peculiar forma Ligotti, hace un homenaje más que evidente al buen Lovecraft con esta historia, bien lograda, aunque un poco apartada de lo que nos tiene acostumbrado, pues en esta entrega nuestro autor es más directo, gráfico y se aleja de ese ambiente ambiguo y sombrío que le conocemos, aquel que te obliga a releer, y formular preguntas durante el trayecto de tu lectura, aquí, en cambio, es claro, te guía hacia aquello que esperas, al clímax, al desenlace como lo haría Lovecraft.

Sin embargo, y no obstante las coincidencias relatadas, no deja de ser un relato inquietante, digno de lectura, el cual deja un grato sabor de boca, con un ritmo perfecto entre tensión y suspenso, con esas migajas de pan que deja regadas durante todo el relato y que recoges mientras avanzas en tu lectura, pero que te das cuenta que es tarde cuánto te estalla el final en la cara,y te das cuenta que has caído en la trampa que el autor deliberadamente te ha tendido.

Un retrato diferente a lo que Ligotti ordinariamente escribe, pero que vale la pena 100%.

Título: La última fiesta del Arlequín
Autor: Thomas Ligotti
Recopilatorio: Cthulhu 2000
Editorial: La factoría de Ideas

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story is dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft, and in many ways it is an updated Shadow Over Innsmouth. This story sees an anthropologist visiting a strange town with unsettling folk customs and bizarrely skewed architecture lit entirely by a nauseous green all pervading glow.

Horror for me lies in the alternate perception of the mundane, or the truly strange. Therefore the decision to focus this story around clowns seemed a little too ‘obvious’ for my liking. Clowns are perceived to be creepy and scary by many people, and it gave the story less appeal than it might have had without the shuffling greasepaint daubed jokers.

A strange ancient rite is eventually discovered in the depths of nearby woods involving the mutations of the strange legion of clowns into ghastly wormlike being who can mutate seemingly at will, writhing in ecstasy in their subterranean woodland retreat they feast on the flesh of unlucky victims in homage to Poe’s ‘The Conqueror Worm’.

Enjoyable, but a little obvious and cliche for my tastes. Another in the ‘look at me being all clever’ category.

[Octavi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un relato muy absorbente y muy "Lovecraftiano". Recomendable.

[Russell D · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastically eerie, and i loved the cover art

[Manuel González · Rating 5 out of 5]

He leído el relato en la edición de GRIMSCRIBE, VIDAS Y OBRAS, publicada por Valdemar ("Gótica", 99). Magnífico cuento que recuerda mucho a "La sombra sobre Innsmouth" de HPL. No en vano va dedicado al solitario de Providence, en un "In memoriam" al final. Conviene recordar aquí que Ligotti se considera heredero de dos maestros: Lovecraft y el polaco Bruno Schulz. Se notan también influencias atmosféricas de Kafka y otros autores europeos como el austríaco Leo Perutz, el británico Arthur Machen e incluso el persa Sadeq Hedayat. Y es que la cultura literaria y filosófica de Ligotti es inmensa, conoce la literatura universal, incluida, desde luego, la escrita en español (me asombró leer en una entrevista que ha leído a Góngora, quizá nuestro poeta más difícil), como ningún otro escritor norteamericano actual, que, de espaldas a todo lo que no sea propio, normalmente solo conocen la de su lengua y país, con ignorancia casi total del resto del mundo, que es mucho mayor y más profundo en el tiempo que los EEUU.

Mirocaw, en el Medio Oeste, es una pequeña ciudad que oculta un blasfemo "misterio" (también en el sentido dramático-medieval) que se celebra durante el solsticio de invierno, justo antes de la Navidad. Los infectos rituales parece que fueron importados de Nueva Inglaterra... Un curioso antropólogo, tan dedicado al estudio de la figura del payaso en diversas culturas como aficionado a disfrazarse y actuar como payaso en festivales, intenta investigar unas celebraciones, quizá relacionadas con las antiguas "Saturnales" o con las "Fiestas de locos" medievales, en que intervienen payasos. Los participantes en las ceremonias resultan ser vagabundos de expresión ausente, verdaderas escorias humanas... Los ritos subterráneos que encuentra, tras superar las habituales primeras barreras de burocracia, silencio y desconfianza, son algo espantoso y repugnante. En esto recuerda a otro relato de Lovecraft, "El ceremonial" ("The Festival"). Baste decir por ahora que todo se remite al "Vencedor Gusano" de un poema de Poe. La vuelta de tuerca final, en el último párrafo, también vuelve a la sorpresa final de "La sombra sobre Innsmouth", que igualmente encontramos, en otro tono, en "Arcilla de Innsmouth", "colaboración póstuma" de Derleth sobre una idea de HPL que me parece proceder, a su vez, del mito griego de Pigmalión y Galatea.

La descripción de Mirocaw, su topografía y sus gentes, sobre todo los degenerados pobladores de un extraño barrio, genera en el lector expectación anhelante e incluso temor. La riqueza de texturas del relato (la académico-antropológica, la descriptivo-topográfica, la atmosférica, la psicológica del narrador en primera persona) me parecía increíble a medida que lo iba leyendo. La calidad de la prosa es admirable, como casi toda la de Ligotti, incluso la que encubre sus peores tramas, pero hay aquí un equilibrio perfecto entre calidad artística, la densidad y extrañeza de la trama y un horror que califico (todo a la vez) de cósmico-existencial-nihilista.

POST-SCRIPTUM:
He leído ahora mismo, en un libro que recopila entrevistas con Ligotti, que escribió, junto con otro autor, un guión para una adaptación cinematográfica de este cuento. Seguramente nunca podremos verla realizada. Él mismo dice que era muy ingenuo sobre la forma de trabajar en Hollywood. ¡Qué pena!
(Añadido el 2/1/2021)

[Bat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This bleak short story had me completely engrossed. I tend to be bias as my favorite horror trope is a man wandering into a town with a dark hidden history (cue Silent Hill) and anything involving clowns. Definitely worth sinking your teeth into.

[lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

first time reading thomas ligotti – what an experience. if this short story is any indication, it feels like ligotti has perfected the kind of evocative, richly textured prose that often feels purplish and overwrought in lovecraft.

Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Conqueror Worm" (1843)

[Roman Tilcer · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Mansour Mangambit · Rating 4 out of 5]

In true Lovecraft fashion spookery.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Horror Short Stories #Anthologies # Postmodern & Contemporary Horror

If Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot transformed the vampire tale into small-town Americana, Thomas Ligotti’s The Last Feast of Harlequin takes the small-town canvas and drenches it in existential dread. First published in 1990, this story is often cited as one of Ligotti’s masterpieces—a piece that fuses homage, philosophy, and the grotesque into something uniquely his own.

On the surface, the premise feels deceptively familiar: a scholar journeys to a midwestern town whose identity revolves around a strange festival. But while a King narrative might lean toward character-driven suspense or mythic confrontation, Ligotti instead spirals inward, peeling away layers of meaning until the festival itself feels like a cosmic joke staged by forces beyond comprehension. Where King’s towns are bustling with gossip and life, Ligotti’s towns seem hushed, emptied, as though reality itself is reluctant to stay.

Comparatively, The Last Feast of Harlequin resonates with earlier traditions of horror but inverts them. There are echoes of Poe in its obsessive narrator, of Lovecraft in its sense of unknowable forces, yet Ligotti is less concerned with monsters than with the void inside human ritual and identity. He takes the carnival—something bright, communal, almost comic—and lets it collapse into a meditation on futility and degradation. If King’s Graveyard Shift makes us shudder at what writhes under the floorboards, Ligotti makes us shudder at the possibility that the floorboards themselves, and the room, and the entire structure of human meaning, are all empty shells.

Placed against King’s Night Shift stories, the differences become almost generational. King thrives on narrative propulsion, giving us arcs that explode with dramatic clarity. Ligotti resists that. His prose lingers, suffocates, circles back on itself like a mind trapped in nightmare logic. Reading Ligotti is less like racing through a horror plot and more like sinking into a philosophical fever dream where the horror is inseparable from thought itself.

From a postmodern perspective, The Last Feast of Harlequin is brilliant in how it interrogates horror’s own mechanisms. The clown figure—so easily deployed in horror for cheap terror (King himself famously weaponized this with It)—becomes here a profound symbol of human absurdity. Ligotti does not merely scare with masks and paint; he asks why we need such masks in the first place, and what lies beneath them. The story becomes a meditation on performance, identity, and the bleakness of existence, echoing the likes of Beckett as much as Lovecraft.

When set beside more contemporary horror writers, Ligotti anticipates the intellectual unease of Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) or the dark satire of Laird Barron. But Ligotti is colder, more stripped of comfort—his work rarely offers catharsis. Instead, you’re left with the chill of recognition, as though he has articulated something you half-suspected about the world but never wanted named.

If King’s The Boogeyman makes you afraid to open your closet, The Last Feast of Harlequin makes you afraid to look at the rituals of daily life, lest you glimpse how fragile and absurd they really are.

Ultimately, this story stands as one of the essential texts of contemporary horror. It shows how the genre can move beyond monsters and blood into metaphysical territory, where dread is not only a reaction to the uncanny but a condition of existence itself. Ligotti doesn’t just write horror—he writes the philosophy of horror, and The Last Feast of Harlequin is one of his darkest sermons.

[Booksasmeals · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Last Feast of Harlequin, by Thomas Ligotti, is spam musubi.

It is all quite ceremonial, clutching our lanterns and entering this muffled maw, our bodies and faces cloaked with garb and gown and veil. Communicating not by voice but from the phosphorescent glow of our light. One by one, shining like little pieces of rice, we move deeper into this tunnel.

We pass through labyrinthine corridors and tight, twisting halls until it opens in an unforgiving cavern of jagged rock.

There is no revelry upon our arrival.

The guests are draggy and lax, waiting with mute mouths, as if the glue from their painted masks has dropped into their lips, sealing their voices forever inside. They surround the altar in the center of the room, without much notice to the spam musubi that sits across the preceding tables.

The taste of spam is not something you ever dreamt to contend with again, but hunger lacerates your gut with black claws. And so you slip a bite from it under your sweat-encrusted mask. It has been dressed with soy and eggs and seaweed and laid atop a bed of vinegar-soaked rice.

But no matter the guise that wraps this meat, the taste of the salty pork still chokes you with a nauseating mouthful. The wet morsel slithers down your throat like a fat worm. You do not wait for it to hit bottom, instead purging the contents immediately.

But the looks you receive are not kind around this room and the bodies swell closer and closer.

It appears the ceremony has begun.

Follow @booksasmeals on instagram for more books as meals!

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you only read one Thomas Ligotti story (and who can stop at one?), it's this one. Elements of Poe and Lovecraft, his two primary inspirations, are added and then deconstructed here, with Poe's penchant for outre poetrics and Lovecraft's insistence on a genetic link between immigrants in New England and evil forces both brought up and ultimately skewered into something stranger and sicker. This being Ligotti, clowns, puppets, strange empty shells of people and depression quickly add themselves to the mix, complete with a genuine climactic ending- something not all that common in Ligotti's meandering, dreamlike prose styling- and a final punch of an ending not to be soon forgotten.

[Squid Hrushka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super fun little short story with very unusual supernatural aspects. I’m not usually into clowns, but the anthropological aspect made it more fun, interesting and mature.

The ending was super bizarre and to the point. Definitely my favourite work of ligotti’s so far. Loved how the story keeps you wondering and leaves you with more profound questions of the festival. Wonderful, inspiring imagery

[Joshua “squid” Hrushka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super fun little short story with very unusual supernatural aspects. I’m not usually into clowns, but the anthropological aspect made it more fun, interesting and mature.

The ending was super bizarre and to the point. Definitely my favourite work of ligotti’s so far. Loved how the story keeps you wondering and leaves you with more profound questions of the festival. Wonderful, inspiring imagery

[Rotren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha gustado mucho el cómo se desarrolla el relato así como la narración del mismo, me ha hecho ilusión lo mucho que me ha recordado a Lovecraft puesto que al final este relato te encuentras una dedicatoria a él.

[Steven Roy Nalagon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really thought it would be more about the Clowns not actually being clowns or how i thought the festival would actually take place at the town's center and everyone in being in on it, Thoss being too much of a loaded gun and when the story hit the climax it was not surprising.

[lifelongreader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. Some gothic short stories are a hit or a miss for me, and this story was definitely a miss.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

nearly perfect / 4.5 out of 5

[Gregory Dolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this just a better Shadow Over Innsmouth? Probably. Does it still feel kinda exactly the same? Maybe

[alaska · Rating 2 out of 5]

what just happened?

[Roger D Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This as about as ‘Lovecraftian’ as they come. The master would be proud.
If this the type of read you enjoy, read it. It was excellent.