One way to hold this word: a colour that is wrong, and that you cannot look away from. Think of a sky glowing yellow at midnight — the light is too much, the wrong shade, and it makes everything under it look strange. From that one picture, lurid moves outward twice. It lands on colours that are simply too bright for comfort, and it lands on stories told in colours that are too strong: the shocking parts turned up until the reader stares.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary records it as borrowed from Latin luridus, meaning pale yellow or wan. That sickly colour is still visible in the literary light sense, and it is the colour the other two senses grew out of.
Wiktionary 記它借自拉丁文 lūridus，意思是「蒼黃的、沒有血色的」。那個病色在文學用法的「慘黃幽光」裡還看得見，另外兩個意思也是從這個顏色往外長出來的。
Wiktionary entry for lurid, etymology_text supplied in packet (kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:921900771:14266)
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