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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.
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...