Dead and Cold

      – Edgar Allan Poe, Silence: A Fable

As they neared the coffin lid, the wind picked up dramatically and a massive, black thunder cloud moved over the site. The walls of the tent covering the excavation began to snap loudly, and as the weather continued to worsen the five researchers finally stopped their work and looked at one another. The conditions had suddenly become so strange that Kowal observed, This is like something out of a horror film.

      – Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

Canadian author-artist Rob Kovitz commemorates the recent discovery of one of the missing ships from the famously doomed Franklin polar expedition with one of his inimitable super-cut bookworks that imagines what may have happened to this and various other fateful northern peregrinations. Warning: includes graphic and shocking scenes of boredom, failure, madness, freezing, murder, cannibalism and mysterious things that may or may not be hidden beneath flat, frozen surfaces.

From the Excerpts From Ice Fishing in Gimli Series.

About the Author

Rob Kovitz is the creator of Treyf Books, ingenious montage-appropriation novels that consist of texts and images compiled from various sources, usually obsessively related to one or more themes, and then recombined to form new works of imagination that are both profusely polyphonic and surprisingly cohesive. Kovitzs previous bookworks include Pig City Model Farm, Room Behavior, Games Oligopolists Play, Death Wish Starring Charles Bronson Architect, Capital of the World, According to Plan, and the 8-volume award-winning appropriation epic, Ice Fishing in Gimli.

Strange and clever.

      – Globe & Mail

Funny, but deep.

      – Umbrella

Is this a new form of discourse in step with its multivalent, chaotic times, or just an excuse for intellectual laziness? Only the author knows for sure.

      – Canadian Architect