Steve Finbow & Karolina Urbaniak uses fiction, non-fiction, appropriation, cut-ups, and a series of over fifty unsettling illustrations to tour the dark sites of Europe with its millennia of genocides, mass murders, serial killings and suicides. A country-to-country death trip, a necro-travel guide, a Baedeker of bereavement, incorporating myth

Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak, Death Mort Tod: A European Book of the Dead, Infinity Land Press, 2019.

Collaborationists Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak's Death Mort Tod uses fiction, non-fiction, appropriation, cut-ups, and a series of over fifty unsettling illustrations to tour the dark sites of Europe with its millennia of genocides, mass murders, serial killings and suicides. A country-to-country death trip, a necro-travel guide, a Baedeker of bereavement, incorporating myth, folklore, maps, reportage, photographs, recordings, illustrations and poetry. Discover a continent’s thanatic history within a textual and visual reliquary – A European Book of the Dead.

Text by Steve Finbow

Images by Karolina Urbaniak

Foreword by Eugene Thacker

Afterword by Brad Feuerhelm

''Death Mort Tod is a beautiful, haunting, moving and unsettling seance of texts and images, sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, but always, already, never more urgent and necessary than now, Now, NOW.'' - David Peace

There is my death, and there is the death of another. There is the death of the individual, living being, and there is the death of others, of many others, of entire populations, entire peoples, of the embalmed multitudes that form the ramified, forensic architectures of human history. There are living beings, huddled together in temporary assemblages of meaningful organization (the polis), and there are the tombs, the mausoleums, the cemeteries, the archives of the dead that themselves form an entire city, a necropolis. There is my death, a human being. There is the death of the species, the strange event of extinction that leaves not even a final member of the species to bear witness to its own end. - From the foreword by Eugene Thacker

Taking each country in Europe and dedicating one artwork and one page of writing, Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak’s collaboration, Death Mort Tod, subtitled ‘A European Book of the Dead’, seeks to tell its readers something about the attitudes to death across the continent. And it does so quite successfully. Mixing fiction with excerpts from ancient and modern literature, real-world reporting from years gone by, historical resources, and old wives’ tales, it weaves a narrative of death and its many ways of materialising. Here we have old wars, recent murders, famous Formula one drivers who came to tragic ends, and victims of genocides that most readers will be old enough to remember.

As a work that makes you think about death and the myriad ways in which life can be suddenly and sadly taken away, it is very effective. Some of the pieces of writing, particularly Kosovo, the United Kingdom, and San Marino, are haunting, memorable, and a stark reminder of some truly tragic events. And the artwork, on the whole, is stunning.
Death Mort Tod is successful in its aim to make us consider one of the only things guaranteed to happen to us all. It is less successful in its attempt, laid out by Finbow in an end note,
‘to provide an anti-identitarian focus, to avoid a totalising version of history and to contrive a literature and continent without finitude.’
Partly because nobody except the author can possibly have a clue what that means, but largely because when a book tries to tell you what it is in such a pretentious and over the top manner, it will need to meet its promises if it’s not going to be called out.
Similar overselling takes place throughout Brad Feuerhelm’s Afterword. Brad tells us that this little book of words and picture is, in fact:
“A choice cut of primacy…a purposeful end of (un)useful ends…an intoxicatingly potent and effervescent satchel of charms and dust and, if construed properly by will and testament, it will reify and immortalise the fits and seizures of our historical age again and again…A warning and a reality so rarely succumb to the same moment of time in one empirical tome.”
If anyone has a clue what they’re both talking about, please write in and let us know.
Any Cop?: Writers, let this work be a warning to you. Don’t be pretentious, don’t try and force meaning into the minds of your readers, and don’t get too far up your own behind. Parts of this book are outstanding. Other parts leave a sour taste in the mouth, and not because of the vicious nature of many of the deaths described. Worth a read for the moments when it really shines, but don’t expect to come away without at least little bit of rage. - Fran Slater
https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/worth-a-read-for-the-moments-when-it-really-shines-death-mort-tod-steve-finbow-and-karolina-urbaniak/