Stefan Grabinski is usually mentioned as the Polish variant of various contemporaneous horror writers from further west, but besides being a horror writer, this ignores his incomparable talents. Metafictional dialogue on the creative process, modernist unease at the technological advances of the time, decadent/symbolist ability to temper the intellectual with the impulses of uncontrollable passions, and a facility for dream imagery and disconcerting sense of place possibly owing more to incipient surrealism.Story-by-story breakdown:Fumes :: Kicking off hard into the psychosexual weirdness that ties Grabinski more directly into a line from Decadence and Symbolism to Surrealism than his typical horror-writing contemporaries. Here, we weave between eroticism to revulsion against a mounting insanity that ambiguously resolves into a concrete causality.The Demon of Motion :: The mobility and speed of the modern era as occult disruptive force.The Area :: This one's especially amazing: A writer attempts to transcend the falsity and artifice of his novels by removing himself from the world and concentrating his mind, for years, on a pure act of creation, to unfortunate outcome. Basically about the tipping point between genius and madness, but via a postmodern trick of layers of narrative reality bleeding together, then bleakly, eerily underlines the futility of creation in an coda that moves this up another level. Possibly the best here.A Tale of the Gravedigger :: I wonder how this story of systematic desecration with a weird twist would have gone over in Catholic interwar Poland. One of the more "normal", but daring nonetheless.Szamota's Mistress :: And then back to the heavily psychosexual with a kind of ghost story about the corrupting forces of desire. What exactly takes place here is ambiguously suspended between a couple explanations, and essentially unknowable, but it works nicely. Again, with the wondering how the Catholic church would have dealt with all this sex. Kinda in line with something like Machen's The Great God Pan, for all of that.The Wandering Train :: Again with what is essentially a ghost story emerging from modern technology instead of antiquity. Nice fadeout into probable ruin at the end, too.Strabismus :: This seems very likely to be another psychiatric collapse, but built so strangely that I can point to a couple explanations that never really pull together solid supporting evidence, leaving the actual course open. In any event, it's about identity, and follows Grabinski's usually excellent imagery.Vengeance of the Elementals :: A fire marshall becomes obsessed with the esoteric forces he believes to underly his calling, for better or for worse. Saturnus Sektor :: A somewhat more conventional study of a psychiatric problem, but all tied up in philosophic questions of the meaning and existence of time, though such analysis is cursorily restricted to "time does not exist! Or does it?!" A lesser entry.The Compartment :: Train travel as drug, complete with the highs and lows of the addiction cycle. This, however becomes merely a backdrop for a love triangle startlingly developed over one overnight.The Glance :: Like Saturnus, this is a descent into madness via a kind of philosophic question, but much more elaborately and perfectly arranged. An obsession becomes a phobia becomes an interrogation of solipsism and the stability of the universe beyond immediate perception. Taken to its furthest extents. In some ways, a little like a more genre-streamlined Khrzhanovsky story.
What do I say about this collection of short stories?It is an interesting collection of short stories. It is interesting because the short stories are supposed to be 'psychofantasy' or 'metafantasy'. The psychological or the metaphysical aspects are the important themes of Grabinski's short stories.An excerpt from the sort story THE GLANCE:"Does the world which encompasses me exist at all? And if it indeed exists, is it not created by thoughts? Maybe everything is only a fiction of some deeply meditating ego? Somewhere out there in the beyond, someone is constantly, from time immemorial, thinking - and the entire world, and with it the poor little human race, is a product of this perpetual reverie."In this story, the main character is always on the look out for the 'unknown' beyond any open door or a street corner. He is frightened of encountering it. When at the end he gathers courage to encounter it, he dies. An interesting concept that speaks of reality that is beyond death (that is, if there is a reality). Grabinski rightly includes both opinions. But the main character is haunted by the 'mystery' throughout his life.For psychofantasy, the first story (FUMES) is an excellent example. What would a person do with his mind when he finds in a lonely cottage with a young girl? Or what would he do with his mind when he finds himself with a newly married couple in a train compartment? The answers he gives are psychologically chilling and revealing.Thus we get the answer for the title - THE DARK DOMAIN. The mind is the dark domain. The thoughts it engenders can be very destructive if turned into reality. Just imagine, if all our thoughts turned into realities. Grabinski plays with that idea and creates stories that can be classified as horror genre. There we have the answer. If all the thoughts turn into realities the world will be filled with horrors. Also treated are the themes related to such themes, such as, life force, moral responsibility, conscience, and reality/illusion.I have not said everything of the writer or of this collection. Each story can be singularly analysed too? For instance, there is a story in which a person travelling in the train asks this following question: What is the use of this velocity if it fails to remove us from the bondage of this earth? There is a story in which a watch maker questions the reality of time - is it better to leave it just like that (free flow of Duration) or to divide it into months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds and mechanize life? There is a story in which confirming the Biblical statement 'the dead bury the dead'. As I said earlier, an interesting collection.
What do You think about The Dark Domain (1993)?
Very neat short stories, would like to read more of them. "And yet, after his thorough examination, which lasted more than a month, Master Vincent showed that behind the pious, seemingly dignified works of art was hidden a sacrilege exhibiting truly devilish skill. The monuments, the marble sarcophagi and family tombs were one uninterrupted chain of blasphemies and satanic concepts. From behind the hieratical poses of tomb angels appeared the vulgar gesture of a demon, on lips bevelled with suffering flickered an illusive smile of cynicism. Statues of women, bending with the agony of despair, aroused the libido with sumptuous bodies, unfurled hair, hypocritically bare breasts. The larger compositions, formed of several figures, created the impression of a double meaning, as if the sculptor had intentionally chosen risqué themes, for the boundary between lofty suffering and lewdness was ambiguous. The least amount of doubt, however, was awakened by the inscriptions – those celebrated Foscara stanzas whose solemn cadences were admired by all lovers of poetry. These verses, when read backwards from bottom to top, were a scandalous, completely cynical denial of what was proclaimed in the opposite direction. They were rank paeans of honour for Satan and his obscene affairs, hymns of blasphemy against God and the saints, immoral songs of falernian wine and street harlots."---" The gloomy elegance of the house captivated him from the first moment he had occupied his new abode. At the end of a black double row of cypresses, their two lines containing a stone pathway, appeared a several-stepped terrace where a weighty, stylized double door led to the interior. Across the iron railing that surrounded the mansion, the wings of the house were losing colour. Sickly and sad walls, coated with a pale-greenish paint, peered out from inside. From underneath the garden, treacherously concealed humidity crawled out here and there with dark oozing. Once carefully cultivated flowers had with time lost the orderliness of their arrangement. Only two eternal fountains quietly wept, shedding water from marble basins onto clusters of rich, red roses. Only a muscular Triton on the left side continually raised his hand in the same gesture of greeting to a limber Harpy who, leaning from a marble cistern on the other side, enticed him for many years with the lure of a divine body; in vain, because they were separated by the mournful cypresses … . The celadon villa gave the impression of dismal loneliness, abandoned by its inhabitants a long time ago and isolated from neighbouring buildings. It ended the street; there were no other houses beyond it – only wide bands of marshy meadows, fallows, and, in the distance, beech woods that turned black during winter and a rust-colour during autumn …"
—Eadweard
So, "The Polish Poe" I guess. Except, with more hubba hubba and a some "conch grabbing". This was a collection of "scary" stories, but not "Halloween scary", for the most part. Every story is deeply existential and strange, like odd feelings you get about open doors and the power of trains. I think 99% of them were the fear of two souls inhabiting one body, or one soul split between two bodies. With the exception of a couple like "Szamota's Mistress", these stories are introspective and reminded me a little of "The Eye"; I felt like Stefan was examining what scares him the most, rather than what would shake the very foundation of our footie pajamas. A few of the stories genuinely wigged me out, like "A Tale of the Gravedigger", "Fumes", and "Szamota's Mistress". I think due to funky pacing in the translation, I felt like all of these could have been expanded.What can I say? The book was awesome. Disturbing, weirdly translated, and funky like old cheddar.
—Sunday
One of the benefits I appreciate most about being a GoodReads member is that I am so often the recipient of referrals that would have otherwise passed me by. That is certainly the case with this excellent book that was recommended by Friends and that has proved to be a very worthwhile read.It is important to note that this collection of short stories is almost a century old at this writing, yet the writer's style was very accessible to me. Often, when reading period works, the language style and cadence is something of a struggle until familiarity begins smoothing the rough edges. That was not the case here. In so many ways, the writer was ahead of his time.These are horror tales, but cut from a very different cloth than most that are offered as representatives of the genre. The reader is often provided with a common setting, quickly becomes aware that "all is not what it seems," and then is drawn into circumstances that escalate into truly frightening proportions.For example, there is a tale of a man who loses the woman he loves when she leaves one afternoon and dies. Because of the manner of her death, it is thought that it could have been a suicide. Now, for most of us, we would likely be thinking, "What would cause her to do such a thing?" But, what he becomes obsessed with is why she left without closing the door behind her. And that odd perspective keeps growing until he is consumed by truly unnerving circumstances.Indeed, a recurrent theme is that evil resides in each person. Those who are particularly sensitive give it strength by poking at its inner reaches until it is able to extricate itself from inside the person and emerge as a whole entity into the world. No vampires or werewolves lurk here. This is pure Barker, Poe and Lovecraft territory and just as unsettling as the tales from those craftsmen.For the horror fan who has not heard of him, this writer is worth discovering...even at the cost of some churning nightmares. I'll be returning to this collection again.
—Jim Dooley
