Word: stygian
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...improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum. Perhaps because Jones has caught lobsters, sold boats, worked on newspapers and taught school, his showy invasion of the private terrors that lurk just below the surface of apparently calm minds seems somehow fresh-and far removed from the structural, Stygian, self-conscious atrocities of the black comedians with whom he will inevitably be compared...
Such, in the Stygian view of a girl correspondent for the underground newspaper Washington Free Press, was the scene before the Pentagon last week. Another rumor that passed around as quickly as a marijuana joint at a pot party had it that two antiwar marchers had been dragged into the Pentagon and summarily executed...
...What? MacBird is hardly a visitant from the infernal backside of American political thought--"a genuine happening in which an underground author confronted the overworld, exposing dangerous private fantasies to public eyes and ears" (Brustein) or "a needed corrective, a purgative of our Stygian world" (Clureman). There is nothing cathartic in its grim charade, and this is not because reality has surpassed the imitation. It is because Miss Garson's satire renders her targets immune to further burlesque by grasping--just once, and fleetingly--all the obvious uglinesses of American politics without giving a sweet damn for what they point...
From above, it looked like a dirty blanket enfolding the whole northeast. Pilots dipping from crystalline skies prepared abruptly to make instrument landings. In midmorning, motorists inched through the Stygian haze with smarting eyes and headlights ablaze. Skyscrapers were amputated at the midriff. Pedestrians in city streets gasped at the miasmal murk even as newspaper headlines screamed that their next breath might be a dose of poison...
Northeast and Canada into Stygian darkness...