Today, dear listener, we rush around like headless sausages to cover two bits of news – a forthcoming tribute anthology themed on the work of Stefan Grabinski, and an enthusiastic review of Thana Niveau’s recent collection of horror stories, Octoberland.
The lurchers, and even poor old John Linwood Grant’s own work, will have to wait for another day. To proceed…
GRABBED BY GRABINSKI
Stefan Grabinski (1887-1936) was a Polish writer who produced some most striking tales of weird and supernatural fiction during the early Twentieth century. In latter days he’s been compared to Poe and Lovecraft, but to be honest, he’s in a class of his own – his story ‘The Wandering Train’ still disturbs us. China Mieville said of him, a while back:
“Sometimes (he) is known as “the Polish Poe”, but this is misleading. Where Poe’s horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski’s is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski’s universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not those we expect, but they are principles – rules – and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour.”
The Guardian (2003)
One of the problems has always been getting decent translations – the nuances of weird and surreal fiction don’t always translate well, because so much meaning can be in the precise words, their sound and ‘feel’, which the writers use. But that situation is ameliorated by the 2012 edition of the Mirosla Lipinski translation, which is a good introduction to Grabinski’s work.
Some of it’s dark stuff, so be warned. He has a thing for trains and the weaving of the weird and the (his) modern world which fascinates, giving many of the stories a quite different feel from some of his Western contemporaries. If this were not enough to endear his work to us, we might note one of Mieville’s other comments in the same article:
“Grabinski has several stylistic tics, and the only one that sometimes grates is his prediliction for ending paragraphs with ellipses…”
Well, gosh, do we love our ellipses here at greydogtales…
IN STEFAN’S HOUSE
So why do we mention this Grabinski fellow at the moment? Because Dunham Manor Press is putting together a tribute anthology. We’re keen to see this one come out so we can have a good flick through. Dunham have a very modest campaign going to raise enough money to give the contributors a penny or two, and we think it’s worth a look. It also has cover art by Paul (Mutartis) Boswell, an illustrator who has begun to make a name for himself on a number of excellent weird fiction projects.
“Jordan Krall here from DUNHAMS MANOR PRESS. I want to publish this excellent collection of stories that are inspired by Stefan Grabiński. Money raised will go to the authors and artists involved including Brian Evenson, Steve Rasnic Tem, Damian Murphy, Christian Wiessner, Michael Faun, C.M. Muller, Ron Wier, Michael R. Colangelo, Trevor Kroger, Liam Garriock, William Tea, and more.
“And yes, I know that Grabinski wasn’t ALL about trains… but personally, that’s what really attracted me to his work. My father (who is now on hospice care) worked for NJ Transit for over 40 years and so anything railroad related really hits home for me.
“The plan is to start this shipping in January 2019.”
The campaign details can be found here:
OCTOBERLAND CONQUERS NOVEMBER
Thana Niveau is neither Polish (as far as we know) nor was she around to ride Grabinski’s trains. A contemporary, self-described ‘horror freak, SF geek, sister of dragons and occasional werewolf’, she had a novel, The House of Frozen Screams, released in October 2018 by Horrific Tales.
Thana now has a collection of her short fiction available from PS Publishing. The latter is described thus:
“Thana Niveau’s stories feature people on the edge – the edge of death, the edge of sanity, the edge of reality. In this diverse collection, two sisters leave a trail of bodies behind them as they go on the run, desperate to outrun the dark secrets of their past. A film fan is haunted by the actress whose brutal horror films he can’t stop watching. A child hears a ghostly voice through the radio reciting only numbers. And a young woman revisits the place she and her brother loved above all else—Octoberland—the strange amusement park that tore their world apart. Horror wears many faces here, from creeping dread to apocalyptic devastation, and no one escapes its dark touch.”
Here’s what one of our roving reviewers, Paul St John Mackintosh, has to say about this new collection…
A Review of Octoberland by Thana Niveau
by Paul St John Mackintosh
(PS Publishing, 358 pages)
First lines matter a lot in short stories. That’s a well-worn truth that many modern writers seem to forget. If you can’t hook the reader from the off, you might as well give up. If La Rochefoucauld can accomplish more in a single epigram than you can in an entire story, then you have a genuine problem. You can’t rely on your cultural kudos, artistic or intellectual aspirations, or reputation to keep eyes moving down the page: you have to snag them.
Fortunately, in Octoberland Thana Niveau crafts, dresses, barbs and baits her hooks so alluringly that the reader will be caught gasping and twitching until the tail end of the tale. “We buried the first body in the woods behind a bar called the ‘Nite Owl’.” (‘Going to the Sun Mountain’) “It was just after the funeral that the cities began to call to me.” (‘The Language of the City’) “SENSATIONAL! The WONDER of the Century! A DREAM of Figure Perfection!” (‘Tentacular Spectacular’) “You’re not supposed to go in there!” (‘Little Devils’) “Murderer!” (‘Wasps’) If those first lines don’t keep you reading, wanting to know what’s behind them and what happens next, I’d be very surprised.
It’s not just about semantic openness, and statements that demand an explication. It’s also about vividness, colour, tone, topic, suggestion. A collection with story titles like ‘The Call of the Dreaming Moon’, ‘No History of Violence’, ‘Death Walks en Pointe’ and ‘The Calling of Night’s Ocean’ is already off to a good start in that regard. The 25 stories in Thana Niveau’s collection are brief, condensed, strikingly imagined, vivid, relentless. The physical quality of the volume is up to PS Publishing’s usual excellent standard, and the cover art by Daniele Serra is a draw all in itself.
Let’s be clear: this is not New Weird, strange tales, dark fantasy, or occult detection. Most of the content is sheer, unapologetic horror. It’s not fey, teasing divagations from social and perceptual norms. It’s not gentle, almost imperceptible pickings at the fabric of consensus reality. It’s not slight intimations of unease born of absences and ambiguities. It’s full-on, full-blooded assaults on your acute stress response, executed with all the gusto of slasher fiction, but none of its cheap sensationalism. You want literally chilling juxtaposition of social media with ancient tradition? You got it. (‘The Face’) You want Mesoamerican apocalypse? You got it. (‘Xibalba’) You want snuff movie fans meeting their hideous consummation? You got it. (‘Guinea Pig Girl.’) You want harsh, acid social retribution? You got it. (‘No History of Violence’) Here and there there’s a hiss of steampunk, a flicker of faerie, but hardly anything to lift the dire, ferocious mood. The nearest this volume gets to a refusal to depict and craft its horrors is the things that aren’t there, in the tale of the same name, and their absences and void spaces are as frightful as most stories’ demons.
Do any of the stories under-deliver on their promise? At times that’s bound to occur, especially in such a voluminous and diverse collection, but it doesn’t happen often. Even when the narratives have to boil down the wonderful suggestiveness of their openings to concrete resolutions, Thana Niveau’s excellent prose is usually on hand to save the day, and finish the job with an appropriately resonant resolution. More than a few do the exact opposite, and end in a completely unexpected, disorienting denouement.
Out of all the horror books I’ve read this year, this is probably the one I’ll be returning to most often in future, thinking “How can I do something like that?” and just “Wow.” A striking showcase of some marvellous work in the genre, and a superb demonstration that horror, in its purest, strictest sense, is more imaginative, diverse, cruelly elegant and finely crafted than it’s ever been.
Octoberland also appears to be available from Amazon as an ebook in the UK, but only as a hardback in the US. Try the links and see what options you get:
For listeners of a loyal disposition, you can find dear greydog‘s most recent stuff all over the place (as he usually is), including:
