macaberesque

comparative more macaberesque · superlative most macaberesque

1. macabre

   He has seizures of erotic and macaberesque madness. He is a sort of necrophile. He has kept a journal in which he sets forth his disease with the utmost clearness.

   1903, Guy de Maupassant, translated by M. Walter Dunne, A Tress of Hair

   1 more example

   Those plots which he prided himself on inventing are, for the most part, very weak; his people go forth one after the other, a macaberesque procession, fitter to excite melancholy than mirth […]

   1909, Jean Jules Jusserand, A Literary History of the English People

plural macaberesques

1. countableuncountableThe danse macabre, or some similar performance or imagery.

   It is a rather striking piece of fantastic macaberesque, composed in paragraphs somewhat too short, after the French manner, and with an obvious straining at unusual rhythms.

   1928, Ferris Greenslet, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, page 60

   2 more examples

   If we can visualise this pattern of pursuit as a sort of figure-of-eight macaberesque—executed by two partners moving with the virtuosity of skilled ice-skaters—we may see how the pattern takes shape in a movement of advance and retreat.

   1951, Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley

   Like children, most of the macaberesques of film and literature content themselves with the kind of play that engenders indulgence rather than repression, limiting their activities to simplistic declamations that are easily dismissed […]

   2011, Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, page 8