Zoo-Hotel Deliria
by Stephen Barber
A brutalist-tower hotel located deep in the woods, deep in the wastelands, beside northern Europe’s seas: here, it’s the Deep North, the True North. Nearby, there’s an accursed city. Here, death’s aperture is opening…
Now I’m aware that there’s a tall and towering figure in my Zoo-Hotel suite with me. I can only deduce that it’s another of death’s overseers, but this time a senior overseer, assigned to dispense with difficult or obstinate cases. If anything, he’s more elegantly darkly-dressed even than the last overseer. He approaches me from the extreme angle of the suite, advances towards me. He looks me in the eyes: ‘You wanted to go back with the living?’ He exposes a scalpel from behind his back, pushes my forehead back against the bed’s surface with a powerful flat hand, holds it there, then uses the other hand, the left hand, to incise a profound near-vertical cut down my throat, from the right-hand side of the jaw, deeply through my skin and flesh, all the way down to the top of the horizontal manubrium bone. All the way, he holds my body tightly, embracing me. Smiling, he then tells me: ‘Let’s see what comes out of that.’
By Stephen Barber
Illustrated by Karolina Urbaniak
out now
Hardbound, 140 pages, 206 x 148mm
ISBN 978-1-915908-13-1
Release date 01/09/2026
About the authors
Stephen Barber is the author of some fiction books - such as White Noise Ballrooms, Thatcher’s Tomb and Into the Wastelands - and some non-fiction books - such as The Projectionists, Abandoned Images and A Sinister Assassin. The Times newspaper in London called his books ‘brilliant, provocative and profound’ and The Independent newspaper called him ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’. He is a Research Professor in art and film at the Kingston School of Art faculty, Kingston University London. He is from the city of Leeds, in the North of England.
Karolina Urbaniak is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. Urbaniak’s published works include Altered Balance − A Tribute to Coil, Death Mort Tod - A European Book of the Dead, The Torture of the 100 Pieces. Her audio-visual work − Gasper (2015), On the New Revelations of Being (2018), Sandmann (2019), The Projection of the True Body (2022), Johannes Rass - Aktion Bos Taurus (2024) − has been shown at festivals in the UK and internationally. Urbaniak’s installation, based on The Fall of Jerusalem by Hermann Nitsch, was exhibited at Prinzendorf Castle in Austria in June 2025. She lives and works in London.