Surely you can find grisly accounts relating to any mode of transportation you care to name. There's nothing uniquely grisly about air travel accidents.
In motor vehicle accidents, you don't have time to think about what is going to happen. As a plane is in a freefall, there's at least a good 30 seconds before ground collision. Having that time to think about how your life is about to end seems grisly to me.
You might struggle for days or weeks before succumbing to your injuries after a car accident. Again, there's nothing particularly bad about airplane accidents, except for the part where they're much more rare and thus much more newsworthy.
Take-off and landing, which account for only 2% of flight time, are responsible for about 40% of fatal crashes. If we include taxiing, final approach, and and initial climb this is 70% of fatal crashes for 6% of flight time [1].
