'...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 consc
ience of today. Sometimes Grabinski is known as the Polish Poe but this is misle
ading. Where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is
cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not beca
use they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's uni
verse 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
