'The Wandering Train' features a kind of ghost train from another Dimension. The first sentence of 'In the Compartment' – 'The train shot through the open country at the speed of thought' – ideally defines the zestful nature of his prose, while the whole story portrays a typical Grabinski protagonist who becomes supernaturally potent once aboard a moving train (this being a Futurist topos that surprisingly seems to have had little influence on sf, either American or European), and intoxicates a young married woman into a fatal orgy (see Sex). Moreover, the dynamics of locomotion, so widely employed and vigorously depicted throughout the collection, could also be defined as a metaphor of the everlasting flow that the stream of life undergoes, or vital energy with no cognizable origin and purpose, which under conducive circumstances manifests itself and takes over, the concept partly drawn from the philosophy of Henri Bergson. The stories from The Motion Demon are remarkable for their explicit use of trains (see Transportation) as engines of release, allowing escape from the immurements of provincial life in Poland: escape and motion being virtual synonyms in Grabiński's work.

There is in his work none of the bargaining typical of most Equipoisal tales: no thrust of story, in other words, towards livable outcomes. The expressionist extremism of Grabiński's best work seems clearly to have influenced his near contemporary Bruno Jasieński, though without any political agenda: for him, the anxieties of aftermath existence are unsolvable. As with many authors of his period who were profoundly affected by World War One, the state – the circumambient world itself – tends to impact on individual psyches as a kind of obliterating absence (see Horror in SF). Selections from these titles have been published as The Dark Domain (coll trans Miroslaw Lipinski 1993) and In Sarah's House: Stories (coll trans Wiesiek Powaga 2007). W pomrokach wiary (coll 1909) as by Stefan Żalny, the best of these stories – most of them horror tales of great intensity and of a sexual explicitness very infrequently found in his English-language contemporaries – were assembled in six collections, Na wzgórzu róż (coll 1918 trans Miroslaw Lipinski as On the Hill of Roses 2012), Demon ruchu (coll 1919 trans Miroslaw Lipinski as The Motion Demon 2005), Szalony pątnik (coll 1920), Księga ognia (coll 1922), Niesamowita opowieść (coll 1922) and Namiętność (coll 1930). After the inconsequential self-published Z wyjatków.

(1887-1936) Polish author, primarily known outside Poland for his short fiction, almost all of which was written between 19.

Cień Bafometa by Stefan Grabiński