The quality of having a grim or ghastly atmosphere in works of art which emphasizes the details and symbols of death:
Macabre
This quality is often found in Latin writers, though there are traces of it in Apuleius and the author of the Satyricon. The outstanding instances in English literature are John Webster, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mervyn Peake, Charles Dickens, and Cyril Tourneur. In American literature notable authors include Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. The word has gained its significance from its use in French as la danse macabre for the allegorical representation of the ever-present and universal power of death, known in English as the Dance of Death and in German as Totentanz. The typical form which the allegory takes is that of a series of images in which Death appears, either as a dancing skeleton or as a shrunken shrouded corpse, to people representing every age and condition of life, and leads them all in a dance to the grave. Of the numerous examples painted or sculptured on the walls of cloisters or church yards through medieval Europe, few remain except in woodcuts and engravings [read more
here].
