July 2012
Hardcover
134 pages
From the standpoint of
English-speaking world, Eastern and central Europe remain The Dark Domain
teeming with creatures unknown and unknowable. The Iron Curtain has long gone,
but the language barrier remains, and numerous great authors, living and dead,
still dwell in the shadows of obscurity, waiting for their works to be
translated into English. Stefan Grabinski (1887-1936) is just
one of such writers still waiting for a full recognition.
In his native Poland he
was an oddity while alive, at the dawn of the 20th century. He was a
writer without roots, without tradition to rely on, an outcast. One Polish
reviewer noted: "His short stories could easily be translations realized
beyond our borders." His predilection to imaginative, dark fantastic and
poetic horror made him a foreigner in his own country. He wrote: "For nine
years no one deigned to notice I was creating a new type of literature
previously unknown in Poland, that I was a pioneer of fantastique in the
strictest meaning of the word, a neo-romantic fantastique of a spontaneous and
autonomous character." Typically, he is one of those authors rediscovered
and recognized only long after their death.
His tales are told "in an
old-fashioned style evoking the bygone era of provincial pre-war Poland, mixing
elements of the supernatural with realistically depicted scenery, filled with a
lingering lyricism suddenly rent by violent images, and laced with a menacing
sense of entrapment and frustrated eroticism", as a foreword to one of his
collections says. Sadly, his fate in the English-speaking world seems consigned
to rare, pricey, slim, hard-to-find small press editions such as Motion
Demon (2005) and In
Sarah's House (2007). The only English edition of his tales which
was substantial in both number of stories collected (not less than 11!) and number of copies printed, with
a reasonable price and tolerable availability, remains The Dark Domain (1993)
from Dedalus.
The latest collection of his stories,
On
the Hill of Roses, has just been published by Hieroglyphic Press: it is
a lovingly produced, slim but beautiful volume, sewn and jacketed hardcover
limited to 300 copies. This means that if you're intrigued by this review,
better hurry before it's sold out.
The
contents are made of the full selection of Grabinski's original edition of On
the Hill of Roses (Na wzgorzu roz, 1918) – plus one additional tale, "Projections",
from his 1930 collection Passion (Namietnosc).
These 134 pages contain a solid introduction into Grabinski's world of
eccentric, alienated characters in the grip of either insanity or fantastic
events which bring them to the verge of losing their minds – or lives. In
either case, just as in Poe's best stories, they try to remain lucid and to
analyze that which refuses to be named and defined; they try to contain the
uncontainable, to understand that which surpasses them, and are usually crushed
by the dark forces from within or without.
On the
Hill of Roses opens with a Foreword
by Mark Samuels and a helpful Introduction
by Miroslaw Lipinski, Grabinski's leading translator and proponent. These are
the stories within the beautiful covers designed by Eleni Tsami.
On the Hill of Roses: A solitary man is
attracted to a walled-in garden with opulent scents. But there is a ghostly
secret waiting there, and another smell – smell of death – becomes more
prominent towards the end.
The Frenzied Farmhouse: This archetypal story of a Bad Place (TM) somewhat prefigures
Lovecraft's "The Colour from out of Space" – although the origin of
the "evil" which affects the inhabitants of a secluded farm remains
shrouded in mystery: "K. maintained that in certain places certain events
had to occur. In other words, that places exist whose character, nature and
spirit await the fulfillment of events connected with them..."
On a Tangent:
A man's obsession with omens and signs turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy,
and he is led i.e. he leads himself through a series of "accidental"
encounters and portents to a grimly grotesque conclusion.
Strabismus:
A rather unconventional story of a split personality (or is it a Doppelganger?
or a spirit possession?) about a man pestered by his complete opposite, and
later haunted by his spirit from a walled-in room next to his own. This story
is also in The Dark Domain. All the others are available in English for
the first time in this collection.
Shadow: A
man looking for a meaning of life and working on a treatise on "Symbols in
nature" comes across a strange unmoving shadow image on a window of an
isolated cabin in the woods. Intrigued by the mystery of the figures frozen in
the act of violence, he befriends the old man who inhabits it, hoping to
unravel the secret of the shadowy crime from the past... A haunting tale in
more senses than one.
At the Villa by the Sea: Another atmospheric story about a past crime which refuses to stay in
the past. A man's visit to his old friend at his isolated villa awakens the
"ghost" of a poet killed there many years ago who won't stay buried.
Projections:
Another lonely bachelor comes to his doom, this time through his attraction to
the ruins of an old nunnery and to the signs of past Satanic shenanigans in its
dungeons. The ending is original in its sadism and uncommonly gory for
otherwise mostly restrained Grabinski.
* * *
On the Hill of Roses offers a number of delightfully
old-school tales of the dark fantastic and chilly horrific which, at the
beginning of the 20th century, created the missing link towards such later
practitioners in the similar vein, like Robert
Aickman and Thomas Ligotti. If
you like them, you should definitely treat yourself with some Grabinski. He
looms like a shadow from out of time and from behind the iron curtain – a
spicy, exotic, Slavic Catholic taste of horror for demanding palates. His doom
and gloom will certainly be refreshing in the midst of the feelgood light
entertainment that passes for "horror" these days.
Note: Some of the illustrations
inspired by Grabinski's works used in this post are by Ryszard Wojtynski; more of them, here.
