Even when the storytelling swerves into Gothic melodrama, the clinical detail is never less than, well, instructive.

The book's style was innovative, combining naturalism with gothic melodrama, and broke new ground in being written from an intensely first-person female perspective.

This novel is partly-biographical, painstakingly researched, and steeped in Victorian gothic melodrama.

The scene-bright colors, huge shadows, flying sparks-was staggering in its impact, awesomely effective, an image from some gothic melodrama.

All three books also share an annoying, and sometimes inadvertantly amusing, propensity for Gothic melodrama and romance-novel prose.

To affect a plausible narrative voice for her period piece, Ms. Hill resorts to a style of Gothic melodrama that sometimes borders on parody.

We're actually in England circa the late 1950s and the '60s, when a studio called Hammer Films was churning out cheap but ritzy-looking Gothic melodramas.

Looking back, almost everything about Mrs Thatcher's 12 years seems touched with gothic melodrama - the political landscape was illuminated not by daylight but by periodic lightning-flashes.

George went on to appear in Rex Ingram's Gothic melodrama Black Orchids (1917) as a character named Ali Bara.

With disarming ease, he could fuse a comedy of manners with Gothic melodrama, blend realism with illusions, and juxtapose low humor and lofty abstractions.