In a grimly funny sequence, she dutifully recites from memory whole chunks from a civil-engineering text he has required her to study.

This novel "is grimly funny, satirical, lively, sad and penetrating," Newgate Callendar wrote in the Book Review last year.

In one grimly funny episode, "the Anny" is a new car model, described by an announcer with the intonation of a radio commercial.

She says the new book "is rich in grimly funny images of the dance of approaching death".

It is stylized at times, utterly direct and both shocking and grimly funny.

Their tribulations are at once specific and universal, by turns grimly funny and darkly ironic.

Such a blurry protagonist allows for a grimly funny portrayal of the campaign process, the task of wooing an electorate at once jaded and eager to be snowed.

Werner, who absorbs these grimly funny lessons, evolves into the film's unlikely moral center.

It is grimly funny, satirical, lively, sad and penetrating.

His helpless suffering under her loving hands is a grimly funny piece of work by Mr. Hurd.