Though of doubtful use, comparisons are inevitable. Most English readers researching Polish fantasy are, like me, reliant on translations. 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. Which is why reading The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski, written between 19, is such a revelatory experience. Of course horror is not that simple, and was never reducible to those knick-knacks, but their tenacity has been enough for scholars to build theories of horror as irreducibly nostalgic, and for some of the most open-minded readers to see the genre as hidebound. The furniture of much contemporary horror fiction - storms, graveyards, skeletons, vampires - could come straight out of the 18th-century Minerva Press shockers or The Castle of Otranto.
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