Word: morbidness
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...third novel in a series of four this latest work from the pen of Vardis Fisher is a noteworthy bit of fiction. It is not startling but intensely alive and vivid in its descriptive passages. A morbid and depressing atmosphere pervades the pages and often the effect upon the reader is a disagreeable one. It is due in part to the subject matter and in part to the author's treatment which is never light, gay, or whimsical. Always his style is heavily laden with emotionalism and morbidity...
...drama for an evening's entertainment. The acting is so good that one cringes with rage at the doings of the mother who in her tantrums succeeds also in causing the death of her aged invalid mother. There is little to raise the play from the depths of morbid despair into which it falls. The comic relief provided by the grandmother comes at the wrong moments and the silly simperings of the giddy mother serve only to heighten the horrors of the household...
...Once morbid Japanese ripe for Death would dispatch themselves with a dagger, elaborately disemboweling themselves in a ritual of exquisite pain. Today such heroic acts of hara-kiri ("belly-cut") are rare. Suicide has gone cheap, and last week Japan's go-getting suicide tycoon, owl-eyed Jinnojo Hayashi, scored another coup. For the second time this year sensation-hungry tourists at his Suicide Point witnessed a triple plunge into the sulphur-stinking maw of Death...
...Lost Horizon" is a distinctive and original novel, in which are blended, with peculiarly happy results, fantasy, allegory, whimsicality, and a pathos that is neither mawkish nor morbid. To tell the story of "Lost Horizon" would be wellnigh impossible, and extremely injudicious, for Hilton's telling leaves nothing to be desired. His characters are vivid, notably Conway, a youngish Englishman, whose exceptional talents the war effectively prevented from materializing...
...village black smith Joe, who is delightful. Henry Hall is up to his usual standard as the convict, although he seems to have stepped straight out of "Tobacco Road" forgetting to re-touch his make up. Florence Reed is a grisly bridge, growing yearly more grisly as the morbid Miss Havisham. Her twenty year old wedding cake is such a masterpiece of Hollywood cobwebbing that even Pip, when asked what it is, says "dunno Mum. . ." Phillips Holmes achieves an accurate and gloriously irritating cockney accent of such poignancy that no one is more relieved than the audience when he finally...