Every book by Anna Starobinets becomes an event. But it was “The Age of Transition,” one of the most striking literary debuts of recent times, that made it clear that the reader was dealing with a real virtuoso of the word. With her dark gothic stories, Starobinets won the title of “queen of Russian horror” and “domestic Stephen King.” Her prose immediately began to be compared with the works of R. Bradbury and A. Azimov, L. Petrushevskaya and even F. Kafka. A children's diary, with very funny mistakes and slips, gradually develops into the confession of a real monster, which you can kill but cannot defeat. Strange people become scary, while scary people turn out to be only strange. Abysses full of stars open up not in the sky and not in the ground, but in the brain.