ghastly

While adamantly miserabilist, it does have a plot or at least one shocking plot point that’s so ghastly it made me giddy.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 19, 2026

His penance is to “pass, like night, from land to land,” repeating his story: “And till my ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 16, 2026

Kirk’s death was ghastly and contemptible, but in a media environment and country conditioned to move on, its shock is already beginning to wear off.

From Salon ● Sep. 24, 2025

Some conservative backlash seems to come from the idea that Kirk’s page should double as an online memorial, smoothing away his edges out of respect for the ghastly way he died.

From Slate ● Sep. 17, 2025

That ghastly laugh was unmistakable, but where was it?

From "The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage" by Philip Pullman

Not least because, given various developing news stories relating to our hosts, the tournament has rather ghastlier noises-off than usual.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 11, 2018

Now investigators believe that both versions have a piece of the even ghastlier truth.

From Time Magazine Archive

Sigmund Freud himself could not have contrived a ghastlier childhood for a poet.

From Time Magazine Archive

Her face was so mobile, so glassily white that if the hand of death had smitten her, she could not have looked ghastlier.

From Tess of the Storm Country by Grace Miller White

A rise of ground hid the house, but when we climbed to the top, the ghost loomed up ghastlier than ever.

From Our Next-Door Neighbors by Belle Kanaris Maniates

Historian Timothy Snyder has defined Ukraine and its Eastern European vicinity as the Bloodlands, the most violent frontier of the ghastliest era in human history.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 23, 2022

They made it to the Super Bowl in 2014, only to have the ghastliest ending in football history against the Patriots.

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 9, 2021

It was that ghastliest of hours — 3 a.m. — bedtime a distant memory and daylight an eternity away.

From New York Times ● Oct. 30, 2020

Native American activists said it trivialized one of the ghastliest episodes in Dakota indigenous history.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 17, 2017

Or else a lost and deeply wounded one, In a wild swamp all bilious greens, Came on a corpse a bare branch dangling on; The ghastliest of scenes!

From Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, December 3, 1887 by Various