The phrase "as a corpse in" is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
It can be used in contexts that describe a state of stillness, lifelessness, or being trapped, often metaphorically.
Example: "He lay on the ground, as a corpse in the moonlight, devoid of any movement or life."
Alternatives: "like a dead body in" or "as lifeless as a corpse in".
Well, you see, I knew him mostly as a corpse in the hallway.
But when Wallander pitches up at a grisly murder scene, must his Volvo always loom, unmissable as a corpse, in the background?
The 18-year-old has cropped up as a corpse in the middle of a park in turn-of-the-century Vienna.
The countess had herself photographed as a frowning nun, as Medea with a knife, as the tragic heroine Beatrix, as Judith entering the tent of Holofernes, as a drowned virgin, as Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, as a courtesan flaunting her legs, as Anne Boleyn, as Goya's "Maja," as a nurse to her dying dog and as a corpse in a coffin.
As for Bedelia, the full story of her self-defence killing of a murderous patient – Neal Frank, whom Hannibal sent her way – has yet to be told, but we're sure to see more; Frank was played by Zachary Quinto, an actor who is too big a name to appear only as a corpse in a brief flashback sequence.
(When O'Toole tells his ex-wife - played by Vanessa Redgrave - that he's been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says: 'Typecast again?') You can't help feeling, on leaving the cinema, that Venus is intended as a memorial to O'Toole himself: the Old Vic grandee, the skittish playboy of What's New, Pussycat?, the Arabian adventurer, the drenched and unwell hack Jeffrey Bernard.
Mantel's writing is dark even when it's comic – the kitchen smell of a provincial hotel described as "deceptively sweet, as if there were a corpse in the wardrobe"; or a woman named Lorraine who laments: "It's so sad to be called after a quiche".
Demjanjuk was rolled into the courtroom on a hospital bed, as if he were a corpse in a medical-school lecture hall.
The durability of sense in entities and in the air in latent forms as if asleep, waiting to be reawakened on specific occasions explains facts that are only apparently miraculous, such as the bleeding of a corpse in the presence of the murder: the victim, if alerted through the air to the proximity of his killer, is again agitated by anger and fear, discharging blood.
"When he is in the room with other persons, speech stops, as if there were a corpse in the apartment", he wrote.
It represents a very considered fear of death; this woman did not want to die and, as such, feared becoming a corpse in life.
