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Fittingly, the Gothic refuses to die. The furniture of much contemporary horror fiction - storms, graveyards, skeletons, vampires - could come straight out of the 18th-century Minerva Press shockers or The Castle of Otranto . Of course horror is not that simple, and was never reducible to those knick-knacks, but their tenacity has been enough for scholars to build theories of horror as irreducibly nostalgic, and for some of the most open-minded readers to see the genre as hidebound. Which is why reading The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski, written between 1918 and 1922, is such a revelatory experience. Because here is a writer for whom supernatural horror is manifest precisely in modernity - in electricity, fire-stations, trains: the uncanny as the bad conscience of today.
Sometimes Grabinski is known as "the Polish Poe", but this is misleading. Where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not those we expect, but they are principles - rules - and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour. A student of philosophy, Grabinski took Bergson, James, Maeterlinck, and extrapolated them, sometimes cross-fertilising them with the science of Newton or Einstein, to create weird tales of a heretic intelligence and of an intense style, which Miroslaw Lipinski, translator of The Dark Domain , renders without contortions or stiltedness. Grabinski has several stylistic tics, and the only one that sometimes grates is his prediliction for ending paragraphs with ellipses . . .
Fittingly, the Gothic refuses to die. The furniture of much contemporary horror fiction - storms, graveyards, skeletons, vampires - could come straight out of the 18th-century Minerva Press shockers or The Castle of Otranto . Of course horror is not that simple, and was never reducible to those knick-knacks, but their tenacity has been enough for scholars to build theories of horror as irreducibly nostalgic, and for some of the most open-minded readers to see the genre as hidebound. Which is why reading The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski, written between 1918 and 1922, is such a revelatory experience. Because here is a writer for whom supernatural horror is manifest precisely in modernity - in electricity, fire-stations, trains: the uncanny as the bad conscience of today.
Most English readers researching Polish fantasy are, like me, reliant on translations. Though of doubtful use, comparisons are inevitable. Judging from the Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy , edited and translated by Wiesiek Powaga, Grabinski is sui generis. Despite the acclaim of avant-garde critics during his life, his radicalism was not so embedded in the form of his writing as that of, say, the futurist Bruno Jasienski. Among his descendants, Grabinski has not the oneiric melancholy of Bruno Schulz, nor the thoughtful utopianism of his admirer Stanslaw Lem.
Sometimes Grabinski is known as "the Polish Poe", but this is misleading. Where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not those we expect, but they are principles - rules - and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour. A student of philosophy, Grabinski took Bergson, James, Maeterlinck, and extrapolated them, sometimes cross-fertilising them with the science of Newton or Einstein, to create weird tales of a heretic intelligence and of an intense style, which Miroslaw Lipinski, translator of The Dark Domain , renders without contortions or stiltedness. Grabinski has several stylistic tics, and the only one that sometimes grates is his prediliction for ending paragraphs with ellipses . . .
His trains are bloated with meaning. Machines to regulate time and to accelerate it, they bring liberation and jeopardy. The image of a careering runaway train recurs, fear stemming less from the obvious physical danger than from the psychic horror of orderly time gone bad. In one of his best stories, "The Wandering Train", a rogue "insane train", unfettered, "without patent or sanction", roaming the rails, terrorising the network, uncouples the everyday from time itself. Trains are also notoriously unsubtle phallic symbols, and in stories such as "In the Compartment", Grabinski is suitably direct about the sexuality of train travel. But neither here nor elsewhere does he use the train journey (or anything else) as metaphor for sex. He is extraordinarily frank about sex and its physicality, but not moralistic.
Grabinski shows us up for our condescension to the past. His themes astonish us - they're so contemporary, so trendy. Fluid gender identities, the discombobulated subject, schizophrenic time - all manner of Deleuzian and media-studies-type concerns, laid out overtly, with shattering precision, 80 years ago in a town near Lwow. In fact his most celebrated story, "The Area", seems almost hackneyed in what lumpen theorists would deem the "postmodernism" of its concerns. It is an astounding piece of work, but its payoff - the revelation that the fantasies of the writer- protagonist's arcane imagination have become flesh, are hostile, vampiric - has been done so many times since Grabinski that it feels a bit like old news. What gives the story its sustained power, though, is the way this notion coagulates in a particular house, which the writer focuses so precisely it becomes more than real.
Nowhere is this commonplace materiality more brilliantly made strange than in the final story of The Dark Domain . In "The Glance", an everyday tragedy sets the protagonist down a spiral not of delusion but of too-precise seeing. In his one-sided conversations with things he cannot bear to look at, his terror of a backward glance, his absolutely ordinary surroundings are invested with pathological menace.
For a writer often referred to as the classic practitioner of fantastic literature in Polish, Grabinski is shockingly undertranslated. When he died in 1937 he had published several short- story collections, three plays and three novels, and yet The Dark Domain is the only volume of his work in English, and it is not a long book - 11 stories.
Two others appear in Powaga's collection, and a powerful non- supernatural tale is available online, at www.members.aol. com/ eurosin/grot.html. There are a handful of others in anthologies and zines, but this is paltry. We, connoisseurs of the weird, demand Grabinski's collected works, in English. Please.
The Dark Domain is Published by Dedalus ltd. To order a copy for pounds 6.99 with free p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. China Mieville's latest book is The Scar , published by Pan Macmillan.
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(Copyright, Guardian Newspapers Limited, Feb 08, 2003)