Word: fiends
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...chilling ferocity of West's satirical attack would be rare anywhere. It involves not only a total rejection of common American ideals, but a Swiftian loathing for the texture of life itself. In his earliest work West recognized this of himself, in the character of a Cultured Fiend who says: "I was completely the mad poet. I was one of those 'great despisers' whom Nietzsche loved because 'they are the great adorers; they are arrows of longing for the other shore...
...thing, she already had a more interesting mind than his. She was well read and neither life nor people fooled her. At 19 she could look back uneasily on "childhood, innocence and ignorance, before the down is rubbed off and the skeleton in all things revealed, and that fiend Doubt become our fireside companion." A bit morbid, perhaps, but still more acute than anything young Henry had yet written. She could also be cattily tart. After seeing Victoria before she became Queen. Fanny set down: "A short, thick, commonplace, stupid-looking girl . . . without even a good complexion...
...parsimonious use of cheap, irresponsible quacks has helped make the mother a hopeless dope fiend. The elder brother is a cynical and shiftless lush, the 23-year-old O'Neill an unconfident and consumptive fledgling writer. Nothing happens: four people merely taunt and bludgeon and resent one another while slowly, and at length explosively, revealing themselves. The play's movement is not forward, but downward and inward. In bedeviling propinquity, the drunken and the drugged exhibit spectral moments of love and convulsive moments of guilt, make accusations that are in effect confessions, go in for cruelties that...
...What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend...
...Calgari, the Mummy, and even Frankenstein are gone. In their place are The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Thing, and Lobo. In The Bride of the Monster, one of Bela Lugosi's last movies, the virile fiend of Dracula has become a rather prosaic old alchemist. It is as if Lugosi, like Varnoff, had at last capitulated to the modern emphasis on drawing the blood from healthy vampires...