Quotes & Sayings About Macabre

The office was a treasure trove for those who delighted in the macabre. It was the Smithsonian of the Lowest Common Denominator. My — Kenneth C. Johnson

I rummaged through the drawers in search of a strong poison. I thought of nothing as I looked; I had to get it over with as quickly as possible. It was as if it were an everyday task I needed to do.
All I could find were things of no use to me: buttons, string, thread of various colors, notebooks - all strongly redolent of naphthalene and none capable of causing a man's death. Buttons, thread, and string - that is what the world contained at this most tragic of moments. — Max Blecher

Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them — Terry Pratchett

I would sometimes see them among the trees, as I did this particular day. They did not come near and never said a word. They stood silently among the shadows. — Chris Priestley

On a Creep Scale from Hello Kitty to Cthulhu, I award it a Freddy
Krueger.
Granuaile MacTiernan — Kevin Hearne

It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers. — Neil Gaiman

Like Lono's sword, he was both a symbol and a lethal tool; like the bayonet, his sole purpose was to be buried in the foeman's intestines; like all of his prior imagined reincarnations, his sole purpose was, like some macabre butterfly, to metamorphose into a killing machine, and die with sword in hand. — Christopher S.M. Lyon

I think most of us are fascinated by the macabre and by the weird and even the nastiness that comes along. — Stephen King

Rafael possessed unfathomable strength. His speed defied the laws of nature...and his bite, good God, his bite. How could something so macabre feel so pleasurable? — Brooklyn Ann

Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre. — Gore Vidal

Murder is only killing in the wrong place. — Pat Barker

--Writing Mystery and Macabre-- — David Pyle

He took one look at my macabre makeup job, and his jaw dropped. "Goddamn, you are hideous. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse." His reaction brought me a twisted sense of joy. Having him call me a zombie when we were locked up together had definitely inspired my look. — Trina M. Lee

My obsession is with the macabre. I didn't write any of the stories which follow for money, although some of them were sold to magazines before they appeared here and I never once returned a cheque uncashed. I may be obsessional but I'm not crazy. Yet I repeat: I didn't write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not so lucky. — Stephen King

A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors. — Terry Tempest Williams

They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men - some in their brushed Confederate uniforms - on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years. — William Faulkner

You walk a fine line between beautifully macabre and uncharacteristically psychotic. — Solange Nicole

Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'? — Sarah Vowell

For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often far worse to use too many." - Which Macabre — Norton Juster

Haw Par Villa is the nutty exception. It's mad, slightly unhinged and overwhelmingly rubbish. Without a doubt, Haw Par Villa is the Louis Tussaus House of Wax of Singapore. There is no higher compliment (...) For it's own sake, Haw Par Villa still had to be terrible, macabre, distasteful and offensive. — Neil Humphreys

People have come, surpassed my soul and left.
I have become hollow and the hollow space inside, hurts. — Aniket More

But both the narcissist and his partner do not really consider each other. Trapped in the moves of an all-consuming dance macabre, they follow the motions morbidly - semiconscious, desensitized, exhausted, and concerned only with survival. — Sam Vaknin

People look at me as if I were some sort of monster, but I can't think why. In my macabre pictures, I have either been a monster-maker or a monster-destroyer, but never a monster. Actually, I'm a gentle fellow. Never harmed a fly. I love animals, and when I'm in the country I'm a keen bird-watcher. — Peter Cushing

By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution. — Steven Pinker

Amelia told me once about a suspicion she'd had for a while. It bothered her quite a bit. She said that Win and I had fallen ill with scarlet fever, and you made the deadly nightshade syrup, you'd concocted far more than was necessary. And you kept a cup on it on Win's nightstand, like some sort of macabre nightcap. Amelia said that if Win had died, she thought you would have taken the rest of that poison. And I've always hated you for that. Because you forced me to stay alive without the woman I loved, while you had no bloody hell intention of doing the same."
Merripen didn't answer, gave no sign that he registered Leo's words.
"Christ, man," Leo said huskily. "If you had the bollocks to die with her, don't you think you could work up the courage to live with her? — Lisa Kleypas

Her cousins laughed, daring the next wave to wash over before they passed. While they ran, a huge swell rolled along the side of the pier, fat fingers reaching up just in time to pluck them from the pier and win the macabre game of tag. Melora watched, helpless, hardly realizing the gravity of what was happening. It had all been a game. Her cousins were so good at games. — Marie Zhuikov

I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre.
Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care of you.
I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you're starting to get paranoid. — Margaret Atwood

What is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? — Kahlil Gibran

And the silence, it cuts me. The silence, it gores me,

Spilling my blood as the rain falls on me.

Excerpt from "Silence — Angela B. Chrysler

Temptation said that we all dream of committing crimes, but that only the unbalanced make that macabre idea a reality. — Paulo Coelho

In the darkest and strangest of places with the most macabre of company, this music moves her and her life pulses hard... And even for Julie's safety, I can't bring myself to smother it. — Isaac Marion

Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises? — N.K. Jemisin

And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing, "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. — Bret Easton Ellis

The Metropolitan Museum of Art some time ago held a display of contemporary art at which $52,000 was awarded to American sculptors, painters, and artists in allied fields. The award for the best painting went to the canvas of an Illinois artist. It was described as "a macabre, detailed work showing a closed door bearing a funeral wreath." Equally striking was the work's title: "That which I should have done, I did not do." — James Keller

When I was young, my favorite picture book was 'Fletcher and Zenobia,' written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It's long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children's book for the times. — Rick Riordan

I am not compatible with life. — Aniket More

Prudence's flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone. — Barbara Pym

She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door
every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum. — Claire Vaye Watkins

It doesn't seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden. — Anthony Hecht

It is one of the many savage ironies in a life suffused with tragedy, that, when she was still married to Prince Charles, one of Diana's most cherished ambitions was to spend a weekend in Paris without bodyguards or photographers, losing herself in the crowd. Instead, as life slipped from her, with the Mercedes horn mournfully blaring into the night like a macabre 'Last Post', her adult life ended as it had begun, in the brazen, staccato embrace of the camera flash. Even in the city of dreams she could not escape her past. — Andrew Morton

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre. — Nicolas Cage

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, short story writer, playwright, editor, critic, essayist and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre.Poe died at the age of 40. The cause of his death is undetermined and has been attributed to alcohol, drugs, cholera, rabies, suicide (although likely to be mistaken with his suicide attempt in the previous year), tuberculosis, heart disease, brain congestion and other agents. Source: Wikipedia — Edgar Allan Poe

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, widely fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult it's teeth. They seem to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit. — Toni Morrison

I don't really think I am interested in the macabre, but I am curious about death. That's normal ... The only certainty in life is that we're all going to die. It would be unnatural not to think about death once in a while. — Andres Serrano

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public. — Jessica Mitford

I like the influence of the macabre, but I don't believe in ghosts. — Sophie Ellis-Bextor

It is true that as people, we tend to remember only the positive. With time, the grim details fade away, and as a species we survive on this notion. In our desire to gloss over the undeniable macabre parts of our American history, we forget. That amnesia manifests itself, especially when dealing with the plight of black men. — Colman Domingo

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,
made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. — Oscar Wilde

Go out and find a copy of 'The Shrinking Of Treehorn' and its sequel, 'Treehorn's Treasure.' Written by Florence Parry Heide and illustrated by the great Edward Gorey, master of the gothic and the macabre, these books are small masterpieces. — Chris Riddell

You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed? — Shirley Jackson

Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful. — Christopher Isherwood

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole. — Lauren DeStefano

Neither spoke, but lat silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.
At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock came so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.
The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house. — W.W. Jacobs

I've always loved horror, I've always loved collecting, I've always loved weird and macabre things, and I've always loved conventions. So what could be better than having your own Fear FestEviL where all those great and crazy things can be enjoyed by like-minded people under one pretty cool roof? Nothing! — Kirk Hammett

And Death it calls as the stone crow breaks. Streaks of blood malform its face.

Death becomes its withered eyes and the shadows whisper, "Lies."

Excerpt from "Lies — Angela B. Chrysler

This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes. — Edgar Allan Poe

Unhealthy love can make fools of women. It causes us to forgive the unforgivable. It twists our feelings into a macabre parody of actual love until we think that our unhealthy emotions are the real deal and not a sick obsession. — Carry Lowe

What I like about the Carpenter take on The Thing is the fact that it just has so much suspense. It seemed like a different story, with the horror elements. Those films that really speak to the primal fear that we, as human beings, have about the unknown have always intrigued me. That's the really scary thing, not the slasher, macabre movies. — Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying. — Ted Hughes

Argentina is really in a different category because they butchered all their Indian or indigenous people in the war of the desert in 1850s. Which sets them aside from their neighbors in a macabre way. — John Gimlette

dripped down her neck and stained the collar of her shirt. It was a mirror to the wash of blood pouring from her scalp, blinding her left eye and trailing down her cheek like macabre tears. — Kayti Nika Raet

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. — H.P. Lovecraft

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination. — H.P. Lovecraft

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they loved to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama's continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamor of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality. — Zelda Fitzgerald

But we never get back our youth ... The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. — Oscar Wilde

If I were pressed, I would admit that she was beautiful, in a dead bride sort of way. — Melika Dannese Lux

Jack the Hellhound: "Make sure you get a booth in the back so they don't see you in assassin-gear and more importantly, to keep the handsome dog hidden."
Robert Knight: "Where's the handsome dog? All I see is an ugly mutt!"
Jack the Hellhound: "You're so funny I'm busting a gut. — Ben Garvey

The Sky was red, but not warm red of a sunset. This was an angry, glowering red, the colour of an infected wound. — Neil Gaiman

In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before the talks were scheduled to begin, Saddam Hussein announced that the independent state of Kuwait had, by virtue of a massive deployment of military force, become a part of Iraq. We were not to know that this act - and the name Saddam Hussein - would dominate international politics for the next decade and more, but it was still possible to witness something extraordinary: the sight of Mrs. Thatcher publicly inserting quantities of lead into George Bush's pencil. The spattering quill of a Ralph Steadman would be necessary to do justice to such a macabre yet impressive scene. — Christopher Hitchens

Simple and predictable seem pretty darn tantalizing when you're a witch.
Lately, I've wished for a lot of things to be the way they were. Gone are my lust
for the macabre and the sweetly sinful fantasies of meeting a vampire. Something
about unconscious people slumped against the dark leather of the booths at
crimson made it less sexy. — Cyrese Covelli

This necklace has cost two very fine men their lives. At times I wear it in tribute to their sacrifice. Other times, I wear it because it goes with this skirt, - China Sorrows — Derek Landy

I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.'
'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance. — Shirley Jackson

By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool's fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe. — Thomas Ligotti

Still, it was a relief to get away from that macabre sight. Gander considered that gnolls didn't look any better inside than out. He hated their guts. — Terry Pratchett

Chad Michael Ward is a master of the storytelling craft. His imagery, both still and moving, reaches deep into the darkest corners of the mind, combining the macabre and the sensuous Revealing humanity's secret daydream atrocities. CMW taps into our most excitable of emotions with a blend of fear and human sexuality. Like an erotic car accident we can not look away from. — Dave Navarro

A year later, when I turned sixteen, my father died of cancer. And from then on the dead form a sort of chain, a macabre necklace that weighs a ton, and whose last, closing link will be me, I guess. — Milena Busquets

Epidermal Macabre
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes,-
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost. — Theodore Roethke

Die in my nightmares; I will live in yours. — Aniket More

For two years, she and Cassie had been inseparable. And then one night, Cassie had disappeared from her bed. In her place, her abductor had left his calling card, a macabre nursery rhyme. Cassie had never come home. — Elizabeth Heiter

If ever I was meant to love, my heart would beat for you,"

Need not the Raven say to Crow beneath the winter's howl.

Excerpt from "The Raven and The Crow — Angela B. Chrysler

The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he'd seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly. — Clive Barker

those ghouls who enter into a macabre dance with pot-bellied netas. — P.G. Tenzing

Poor kid
all she'd wanted to do was get her teeth fixed. — Tom Upton

She drew the main outline, keeping her fingers on the ferrule - the metal piece that clamped the bristles to the handle - and created a nose, mouth, and eyelids. For a moment, she wondered what color his eyes might be, then shoved aside the macabre thought. He had a strong, square jaw, his hair pushed back, looking sticky from the dirt that had been thrown directly onto his face. — Dana Marton

I intended that when the curtain went up the scene should confront the public like the exaggerating mirror in the stories of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, in which the depraved saw themselves with dragons' bodies, or bulls' horns, or whatever corresponded to their particular vice. It is not surprising that the public should have been aghast at the sight of its other self, which it had never before been shown completely. This ignoble other-self, as Monsieur Catulle Mendes has excellently said, is composed "of eternal human imbecility, eternal lust, eternal gluttony, the vileness of instinct magnified into tyranny; of the sense of decency, the virtues, the patriotism & the ideals peculiar to those who have just eaten their fill." Really, these are hardly the constituents for an amusing play, & the masks demonstrate that the comedy must at the most be the macabre comedy of an English clown, or of a Dance of Death. — Alfred Jarry

These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as "Will I ever do time?" and "Did this girl have a trusting heart?" The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausage, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and still I can't tell if I'm cooking any of this correctly, because I'm crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before. — Bret Easton Ellis

I see black light (his last words) — Victor Hugo

And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots. — H.P. Lovecraft

Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.
- "Azathoth" from Dagon and Other Macabre Tales — H.P. Lovecraft

An element of the burial custom which today seems particularly macabre was the possibility of being buried with a companion, a male or female follower, presumably usually a slave, killed for the burial. — Else Roesdahl

At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction) — Michel Parry

In the distance Richard could see the skyscrapers of Los Angeles rising out of the ocean; barnacle crusted concrete and steel emerging from crashing waves. Once a symbol of economic might, they were now a macabre monument to the mortality of man. — Alexander Ferrick

Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on. — Charles Fort

These rapid scribbles, the pixels arranged by fingers henceforth forever still, acquired the macabre aspect of husks. — J.K. Rowling

All of them were shriveled, desiccated, bone-thin and skeletal, every jaw cruelly broken, opening and closing in mute entreaty, the teeth clacking together like macabre wind chimes as they pendulated in the lurching trees. — Edward M. Erdelac

Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan. — Sam Weller

In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air. — Claire Fuller

Emma was horrified and transfixed at the same time. She was watching Jonah Kinlock doing what he did best. There was a certain macabre beauty in watching form and function wedded together. In Jonah's case, a dance of beauty and death. — Cinda Williams Chima

Mrs Downs, a large sad lady who described herself, to Rupert's delight, as bulky but fragile, now came four mornings a week to clean the house. She was one of those people who habitually looked on the black side of everything with a cheerfulness that bordered upon the macabre. — Elizabeth Jane Howard

He found a scene very much as Yale described, although, in his more accomplished hand, the macabre details would be far more graphically rendered: rats had gnawed "wet red galleries" into the bodies of the dead, many of which "were already swollen twice or thrice life-width, their fat heads laughing with black mouth. ... Of others the softer parts were fallen in. A few had burst open, and were liquescent with decay." Venturing deep into — Scott Anderson