macaberesque

English

Adjective

macaberesque (comparative more macaberesque, superlative most macaberesque)

1. macabre
   • 1903, Guy de Maupassant, translated by M. Walter Dunne, A Tress of Hair:

     He has seizures of erotic and macaberesque madness. He is a sort of necrophile. He has kept a journal in which he sets forth his disease with the utmost clearness.

   • 1909, Jean Jules Jusserand, A Literary History of the English People:

     Those plots which he prided himself on inventing are, for the most part, very weak; his people go forth one after the other, a macaberesque procession, fitter to excite melancholy than mirth […]

Noun

macaberesque (countable and uncountable, plural macaberesques)

1. The danse macabre, or some similar performance or imagery.
   • 1951, Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley:

     If we can visualise this pattern of pursuit as a sort of figure-of-eight macaberesque—executed by two partners moving with the virtuosity of skilled ice-skaters—we may see how the pattern takes shape in a movement of advance and retreat.

   • 1928, Ferris Greenslet, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, page 60:

     It is a rather striking piece of fantastic macaberesque, composed in paragraphs somewhat too short, after the French manner, and with an obvious straining at unusual rhythms.

   • 2011, Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, page 8:

     Like children, most of the macaberesques of film and literature content themselves with the kind of play that engenders indulgence rather than repression, limiting their activities to simplistic declamations that are easily dismissed […]