One Of The Mirocaw Clowns

[G. S. Carnivals]

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It was one of the Mirocaw clowns. Its clothes were shabby and nondescript, almost in the style of a tramp-type clown, but not humorously exaggerated enough. The face, though, made up for the lackluster costume. I had never seen such a strange conception for a clown's countenance. The figure stood beneath a dim streetlight, and when it turned its head my way I realized why it seemed familiar. The thin, smooth, and pale head; the wide eyes; the oval-shaped features resembling nothing so much as the skull-faced, screaming creature in that famous painting (memory fails me). This clownish imitation rivalled the original in suggesting stricken realms of abject horror and despair: an inhuman likeness more proper to something under the earth than upon it.       Thomas Ligotti - “The Last Feast of Harlequin” Added by: G. S. Carnivals on 06-09-2007 #74

[The Silent One]

Disquieting.

[Shahira]

Ligotti certainly offers various interpretations of the clown as such himself in "The Last Feast of Harlequin".

However to me, this is an obvious allusion to H.P. Lovecraft´s degenerated ("blasphemous") fish-frog-persons in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", hence to degeneration in general.