Dark Domain

reading The Dark Domain by Stephan Grabinski 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 what we expect, but they are principles - rules- and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour.''China Mieville in The Guardian