Robinson Crusoe found God in solitude, and when, after 20 years on his lonely island, he finally saw a footprint in the sand, he almost went mad. Horrified, he temporarily lost his religion, noting, “How strange a chequer work of providence is the life of man!” Crusoe did return to God, and he ultimately survived because he ceded control of his life.

Catalan writer Albert Sanchez Pinol has written a strange, modern-day “Robinson Crusoe” in his debut novel, “Cold Skin” (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 180 pages, $20).The priggish, judgmental narrator has volunteered for a post as a weather official on a remote Antarctic island. He finds a desolate weather station, and his only companion is a brutish lighthouse keeper.

Making matters worse, he is attacked by eel-like humanoids after nightfall; these horrid scintillating creatures are examples of what H.P. Lovecraft called, in a sense sharper than our own,”weird.” Lovecraft wrote that “the oldest and strangest emotion of mankind is fear,” and Mr. Pinol has indeed constructed a tale of almost mythical proportions.

As time passes, his hero becomes more and more like the lighthouse keeper. Every night, they slaughter hordes of undersea men, but their supplies dwindle. They make numerous references to “The Golden Bough,” as if their antipodal nightmare were only a high-contrast version of regular human existence, a barbaric creation story revealing the ruthlessness hiding beneath the European narrator’s rationalist veneer.

Mr. Pinol’s darkly compelling book is recommended to all lovers of uncanny literature, although several of its sentences are more than uncanny: “That infernal beating weakened the door even as it shook my spirits,” Mr. Pinol writes,in deadly thrall to rhetoric. Elsewhere he writes that “the landscape we see beyond our eyes tends to be a reflection of what we hide, within us,” and in that spirit it could be said that the narrator’s white elephants indicate his wretched civilized soul. He ultimately survives when he cedes control to terror, and becomes a brute himself.

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Translated into English for the first time, Gert Ledig’s novelistic memoir of the Eastern Front takes a bird’s-eye view of men pushed past the limits of their humanity. Ledig (1921-99) served in the Nazi army, and “The Stalin Front” (NYRB Books, 198 pages, $14), translated by Michael Hofmann, appears more realistic the more it resembles a horror story. Ledig’s imagery has an exaggerative magic, made terrible by the reliability of his true-life experiences.

The hill with the pylon on it would have served as an ideal observation point for the whole sector, except that setting up a periscope on the ploughed earth would have been rather like putting a mirror in a cement mixer.

As goes the battlefield, so go the minds of the men upon it.”Any thought was a waste of time,” Mr. Ledig writes of a runner along the trenches under bombardment. Every character in this novel expects to die, and one commander directs a captain to murder one of his men because “the man is dead, theoretically.” But “The Stalin Front” is not simply a paean to exponential horror; rather, it is a send-up of intensity. It should be a classic of war literature. Without cracking a smile, it reveals its extreme of human experience to be meaningless.