Problem: swój – obcy a konwencja powieści sensacyjnej. Kotowskiego Śmierć na placu Lalek

The subject of the analysis is a novel by Krzysztof Kotowski. Death at the Puppet Square (Kotowski 2011). This novel combines four narrative plans: a sensational novel, a psychological novel, a metaphysical plan, a novel of the sf. This novel is juxtaposed with another novel by this author, namely the Festival of Lights, which is a "classic" police novel (Kotowski 2013), and also with the novel of Dominik W. Rettinger Talizmany (Rettinger 2017), though reaching to some esoteric threads, is also a sensational and moral novel (the theme of the talismans is treated, in summa, quite pretext). I recalled these two novels to indicate on the background that Kotowski's novel Death at the Puppet Square is a work that generally combines two genres: a sensational novel genre (kidnapping and trafficking) and novel sf genre (there are two threads here: the first is the description appearing - existence - people who are next to us (?), who appear when some fundamental moral principles are violated, the second - the problem of interpretation of certain phenomena in psychology, the third - through a distant reference to Solaris Lem - an attempt to describe the behaviors of creatures that they 45 are called by some force (?) to perform a specific task, and then - they die (?)). In this way, there is another plan in the novel ' Death at the Puppet Square (Kotowski 2011), namely the description of the meeting: its own - the stranger is not only one of the protagonists, but also the protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the author tries to show that Kotowski's novel is an innovative attempt to write a novel sf, in which the main axis are the problems of psychological sciences, as well as philosophical issues (epistemological, ontological and axiological).