Stefan Grabiński (1887–1936) was a Polish writer of fantastic and horror fiction. Born in Kamionka Strumiłowa (now Kamianka-Buzka, Ukraine), he studied Polish literature in Lviv and was diagnosed there with the tuberculosis that ran in his family. He was deeply interested in parapsychology, magic and demonology, and drawn as well to Christian mysticism, Eastern religious texts and Theosophy.
In 1920 he published The Motion Demon (Demon Ruchu), a collection of mystic railway stories. His fiction is populated by incubi, witches, doppelgängers and messages from the underworld, steeped in magic and occult eroticism — which is why he is likened to Poe and Lovecraft yet set apart from both. As his illness worsened he was abandoned by most of his friends, and he died in extreme poverty in Lviv in 1936.
He was largely forgotten until after the Second World War; Stanisław Lem acknowledged his influence on his own early work. English readers came to him mainly through Mirosław Lipiński’s translations, collected by Dedalus in 1993 as The Dark Domain.