Word: gothic
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...Ravages of Spring a middle-aged country doctor on a round of house calls finds himself threatened by a string of tornadoes. He seeks shelter in a clap-board-gothic house and lands in the middle of a Vincent Price movie. It includes a mad scientist, a demented, beautiful woman and a terrible secret: through genetic tinkering, the scientist claims to have discovered how to populate the world with exact duplicates of himself and his companion. Solipsism teeters toward the edge of reality. The storm explodes the house like an inflated hypothesis, but the doctor survives...
...Magus (1966) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) came in impressive sequence, one surpassing another in virtuosity, like the work of a magician developing his craft, slow motion, before his audience. The Collector was a comparatively simple pass?butterflies in psychotic transformation turned into pinioned women, perhaps a gothic variation on Lepidopterist Nabokov. In The Magus, Fowles worked gaudier effects: allegory, romance, black magic. The French Lieutenant's Woman played the entire Victorian milieu against the 20th century; Fowles could so persuasively dream up another world that he was free to call all of it into speculation by proposing...
...people of other faiths, the Mormon temple is an impenetrable place of mystery. Whether it is the Gothic-spired colossus in Salt Lake City, the bone white cruciform on Hawaii's Oahu island or any of the other temples that serve the 3.3 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the curious outsider invariably meets a closed door. Only Mormons in good standing can participate in the holy "ordinances" that are performed in the temple precincts, or even visit the rooms where they are performed...
...downtown Atlanta, an abandoned Unitarian church has been converted into a dining place called the Abbey. The 70-year-old building-where Author Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind) was married-is graced with an elegant stained-glass front window, vaulted, beamed ceilings and a crafted Gothic interior. Though it might seem odd to some that Christians should go to a church for sole rather than soul, the Abbey has been serving capacity crowds. Most favored of its five dining areas: the choir loft, where monk-robed waiters Handel their guests with priestly concern...
Spain has long held a firm grip on man's imagination. It is the land of mystery, a Gothic tapestry sewn together from strands of brutal sunshine and lustful blood, of tart wine and even tarter women. It is the secret of thunderous clouds menacing El Greco's Toledo; the acrid fire consuming the bodies of heretics during the Inquisition; the melancholy strains of a guitar played after a day's labor in the fields; the gnarled branches of the olive trees that cluster throughout the sun-beaten hills. It is the legend of the independence of the leather-skinned...