Two days after Halloween, I’m still
in a spooky mood.
That’s because I’m in the afterglow
of the Oct. 29 meeting of the Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis. Many of us
wore costumes, the story of the evening was “The Adventure of the Sussex
Vampire,” Vincent Wright talked about mass murderer H.H. Holmes, and Leslie
Klinger brilliantly held forth on the undead.
All of this was appropriate for a
Sherlockian group. Arthur Conan Doyle masterfully evoked a Gothic mood with his
word portraits in more than a dozen Holmes stories. For example, here’s how he
has Dr. Watson describe Stoke Moran in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”:
“The building was of gray, lichen-blotched stone, with a high central portion and two curving wings, like the claws of a crab, thrown out on each side. In one of these wings the windows were broken and blocked with wooden boards, while the roof was partly caved in, a picture of ruin.”
This picturesque description employs
both nouns and adjectives to paint a haunting word portrait of a house the
Addams Family could love. Nouns used to similar effect in other stories include
decay, ghost, curse, soul, fate, secret, fiend, supernatural, hell-hound,
monster, devil, lunacy, lunatic, menace, shadow, despair, demon, Satan, terror,
horror, fear, shock, delirium, freight, danger, gloom, darkness, and night.
Spooky adjectives adding to the
chills in the Canon include menacing, malignant, ill-omened, spectral, weird,
wicked, furtive, crazy, horror-struck, unnatural, distorted, grim, haunted,
deadly, bleak, hysterical, delirious, demented, hellish, horrible, mysterious,
devilish, diabolical, lonely, terrified, singular, strange, creeping,
extraordinary, somber, depressing, dangerous, maniacal, melancholy,
inexplicable, devil-ridden, deformed, dark, sinister, fantastic, medieval,
monstrous, bizarre, and (perhaps my favorite) grotesque.
Coming from the Ernest Hemingway school
of writing, I try not to use adjectives and adverbs as much as strong nouns and
verbs in my own writing. But in Conan Doyle’s hands they are very, very
effective.
No comments:
Post a Comment