Anyway, as the king and his fellow jerks enter the court, Trippetta hooks a, uh, hook, to their chains and dangles them from the ceiling. Hop-Frog, meanwhile, sets about publicly lighting them on fire before laughing maniacally in triumph and escaping into the night. Poe spends a full paragraph describing their charred corpses.
And thus was the murder-clown born.
Paul Budd, Creative Commons
The incident was, unbelievably, based on the Bal des Ardents, a real-life costumed inferno at the court of France’s King Charles VI in 1393. But that’s not the story’s only inspiration: “Hop-Frog” has also been flagged as a personal revenge story against Elizabeth F. Ellet, an author and occasionally literary critic, who didn’t like the dirty letters Poe was sending to another woman.
The incident was the start of a lifelong feud – well, a three-year feud; everyone involved died pretty quickly thereafter – that included Poe’s wife/cousin Virginia actually blaming Ellet for her death from tuberculosis. Poe, meanwhile, worked through his grief in true Poe fashion by turning Ellet into a shitty king and himself into a homicidal jester.
And here we all just thought clowns were creepy.
Eirik Gumeny is the author of the Exponential Apocalypse series, a five-book saga of slacker superheroes, fart jokes, and assorted B-movie monsters, and he recently added werewolves and assassins to The Great Gatsby. He’s also on Twitter a bunch.
Top Image: Warner Bros.
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