From the back, Kristin looked as
wraithlike as ever, her shoulder blades jutting out in two sharp planes beneath the thin fabric of her shirt.
Pinter's
wraithlike dead characters also reveal mismatched contraries: father/betrayer (Macgregor) and mother/whore (Jessie).
It is a vibrant and consistently surprising account that chases the
wraithlike spirit of the Great Emancipator as it is incarnated or invoked by those around us, usually on less-than-hallowed ground." ART WINSLOW
No longer the disarming,
wraithlike force of Tarchetti's novel capable of exerting a supernatural control in her absence, Beresford's Fosca becomes a compliant, self-sacrificing, Angel of the House, as much a moral victim of the emissaries summoned from heaven and hell to rescue her from temptation as she is an artistic victim of Beresford's clich6d deus ex machina.
THE BODY, WHICH USED TO The body, which used to float down the boulevards,
wraithlike, radiating attraction, topped by a face like a knife with a baby pout now refuses to get out of bed.
In Part Two there are more names, and the connections between the characters become clearer, more "realistic," but no less
wraithlike for this supposed substantiality: the names don't quite fit, seem to be referring to people with different--if similar--stories, and the characters are all still in their familiar hells, waking and dream-lives likewise caught in closed circuits of desire, regret, resentment, and self-loathing.
I get the shivers on that road, always expecting some
wraithlike figure to drift spookily in front of the car, imagining the screech of brakes, a dead face peering at us from beneath a cowl.
What scaly,
wraithlike hands had passed over her stuff?" Arranged by type of crime reported, from 'Critters' to 'Love', The Police Log alternate poignant observation with laughs.
True, things like the ton (100 [pounds sterling]), pony (20 [pounds sterling] or 25 [pounds sterling], depending on where you live) and monkey (500 [pounds sterling]) still have a theoretical,
wraithlike existence in informal currency terms, but the rich terminology for anything under a pound was swept aside almost overnight in February 1971.
The late-nineteenth-century trope of the
wraithlike, consumptive Jew eventually ceded to modern anti-Semitism: the "Oriental" (201), un-athletic Jew's body became fat and diabetes-prone, double proof of racial inferiority.
Now grown up but paranoid and dosed on medication, he's back in his home town because his childhood sweetheart (Emma Caulfield) has called asking for help with her young brother Michael who's terrified of the dark and is having exactly the same nightmares about a
wraithlike figure he did.