Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...aluminum-sheathed prisms of the World Trade Center are 30 feet high, and though you can get on the Staten Island Ferry and feel it shiver under your feet, it can only carry half a dozen riders at a time. The Woolworth Building leans crazily, canted forward like a gothic shed in the wind. Its terra cotta façade has become a wedding cake of writhing mullions and bulging cornices; the windows glow green, and inside in plain view there are people yelling at file clerks, chasing secretaries and munching what are probably pastrami sandwiches. On the roof, like...
...horrors Daniels describes divide fairly neatly into two species-Things Seen and Things Unseen-and each has inspired its own tradition. The tradition of Things Unseen dates from Horace Walpole, a wealthy English dilettante who built his own medieval castle and in 1764 published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. Madness and murder stalk Otranto's parapets, but violence is held to an artful minimum: Walpole's readers wanted to nibble at forbidden fruits-but not to find worms...
...kind of horror story. Even the tyrannical computers and the Things from Outer Space were foreseen by H.G. Wells and others. What has changed is the technology that transmits the frisson. The shudders that came in books now emanate from screens. But the stories are essentially Victorian or gothic. Lon Chancy dominated the horror market of the '20s playing 19th century monsters like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the superstars of horror in the '30s, won their fame as Frankenstein's monster and Count Dracula. King...
...authors turned their nightmare world into a German gothic tale: the Emperor of Atlantis (Baritone Meinard Kraak) has declared a holy war on mankind. Death, overworked, goes on strike. With no one dying, the kingdom is about to burst, and the ruler has to make a deal with Death. "We human beings cannot live without you," the Emperor says and consents to become Death's first victim if he will return...
What does the smile of the native optimist have to do with the groan from the cross? What cement will join a world of plastic to a world of Gothic stone? These are the persistent questions of J.F. Powers (Morte D'Urban), with Flannery O'Connor the finest American writer on Catholic themes. Powers' new group of short stories provides no answer, only a cosmic sigh...