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 Poes horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinskis is cerebral, investigative.

His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinskis 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 Guardia.