The Dark Domain (Dedalus European Classics) - Softcover

Grabinski, Stefan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1909232041 ISBN 13: 9781909232044

Publisher: Dedalus Limited, 2013

Synopsis

'...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

About this title

About the Author:

Stephan Grabinski (1887-1936) Polish short story writer and novelist. Studied at Lvov University before becoming a teacher. He published seven volumes of short stories, three plays and three novels all within the fantasy genre. Dedalus has published a volume of his short stories under the title of The Dark Domain and a further two stories in The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy.

Miroslaw Lipinski is a Polish-American translator based in New York City. His passionate advocacy for the writing of Stefan Grabinski has done much to create a readership for Grabinski in the English-speaking world. He has translated a collection of Grabinski stories for Dedalus, The Dark Domain.

Review:

'Grabinski's commitment to a marriage of the newly announced unconscious with the supernatural gives his extravagances some conviction. These short stories offer the pleasure of myths we can crack and skilfully chilling denouements.'

David Buckley in The Observer

'Psycho-fantasies, doom-saturated tales of lonely men lost in hostile terrain, but the melancholy lifts to provide wonderful odd scenes, like the watchmaker whose death stops all the town clocks and the phantom train that always turns up unannounced, surprising the station staff'

Time Out

'Stories that brilliantly convey his love of supernatural horror. It is not the horror of haunted houses or castles, but that found in everyday modernity around him. In this dark selection, lonely souls travel on trains, coming face to face with sinister conductors and wanton women.'

The Herald

About this edition

• Publisher: Dedalus Limited
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1909232041
• ISBN 13: 9781909232044
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 153