This, for those of you who are unaware is Death…at the moment this page will only contain a review of the upcoming Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby release entitled Death's Domain. The drawing above is by Paul Kidby…all copyrights belong to Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby. Oh, yes…Death likes cats if you were a little confused…

Death’s Domain a Discworld Mapp – reviewed by Osman

The latest in the line of Discworld maps, Death’s Domain is by far the most impressive to look at on the shop shelf! It has ornate Silver lettering, with "supernaturally" blue coloured outlining and an excellent Paul Kidby illustration of Death holding a suitably styled picture frame of his home (Mon Repos as it says on the frame). Plus there is a stylishly marbled black background which upon closer inspection can be seen as black clouds…and I mean black…Death’s Black. But that is not all, oh no, not by a long shot. If this was not enough to tempt you to buy, humour has been attempted on the rear cover!!! (Humour in a Pratchett publication…*gasp*!) A few choice quotes for you to ponder over:

So if that’s not enough to tempt you to buy the darn thing, I’ll get on with doing what I’m not paid for…reviewing the latest Discworld release!

…as always, is essentially the core to any good work of Pratchett. The "mini-book", that is the mapp’s accompaniment, sets the scene for any new reader as well as for the experienced reader. As usual making Terry, and this publication, accessible to all.

Well, to answer this simply would just not be in true Discworld style…so I shall endeavour to just simply answer it! This mini-book tells us the basic history of Death, as he has developed through the Discworld books, and gives an insight into his mind and how he himself has changed due to the development of a curiosity about his job. It also gives us a brief resume of Death’s "relatives"…and Albert of course! So for the Discworld reader amongst you, and I’m sure there must be a few of you reading this (!), there is nothing really new to be learnt yet .

After the introduction though, we move onto the actual Domain. Here we are told of how things actually look in Death’s Domain. A picture is painted for the minds eye, a very dark picture, yes, but if you look hard enough you can just about see the details laid out in front of you. All the areas of the Domain get explained as fully as they need to be and give the reader insight as to why the heck you find a crazy golf course and a maze in the Gardens of Death, and why the animals are just not what they should be. Then there are the gnomes, not your average garden gnomes…I say no more. Poor guy, he does try his best to understand humans, but comes out of this description of the Domain as a very confused anthropomorphic personification! Though if it is possible, in some twisted sense of the word, for Death to have "enjoyment" in his life…sorry, non-life, then I guess these few things make his Domain a more enjoyable place to be for him. I would say for any visitors he has, but for some unknown reason he doesn’t get that many…well at least none that are around for very long!

Getting more comfortable now, we move inside the House of Death. Although it sounds like something from a horror movie, in this one you are unlikely to die…you leave just how you entered, alive or dead. As long as you don’t catch Death in a really bad mood! We are told the reasons why Death built this house the way he did, and why it is not so dark and brooding. If you think about it, everything makes sense. Death built the house around the designs he knew best, the places he went to the most often. Yes I know, he probably visits more insects than humans, but he is human in shape…so it makes perfect sense for him to design his home around the houses of humans. That is not to say that the interior design is not to personal taste. As Lloyd Grossman would put it "There is a very definite black theme here, with a lot of skull-and-bone motifs around this homestead, the person we are looking for also seems to have an obsession with hourglasses and reading. Now let’s review the clues…a bathroom with hard towels, a clock with no hands and the black theme throughout…who would live in a house like this, over to you David?" (Actually I can’t help but think how he would actually describe this home…I’m pretty sure that the panel would guess whom it belonged to straight away though!).

And as we leave this place, Terry reminds us that that Death is a mere personification, that everything in his Domain is Death and that Death as we know and love him is "just…the minute head that trails the whole immense, dark comet, one focused node in the hugeness of inevitable mortality." But what with Terry being who he is, he couldn’t leave it on that note, and threw in a little humour as a precursor to studying the mapp…"Death is everywhere. But somewhere he is buying a chicken korma." I wonder how many of you out there are eating a Chicken Korma right now?

Again as is no surprise Paul Kidby excels himself. The drawings within the book itself are marvellous, as detailed as we have come to expect from Paul, and as lifelike as a drawing can ever be. Normally though I have to admit that I admire the drawing of the people a lot more than the drawings of the objects. In Death’s Domain though I cannot help but admire the drawing of the clock and of the teapot. I believe it may not be long before that teapot is made into a more substantial form, because it’s a very nice teapot and I can see Terry himself pouring cups of tea from it for his guests.

The mapp itself is a very nice piece of work. I believe Paul should be highly commended for this work. It’s just the way it all looks as a whole picture, with the golden corn fields (the only real colour on the mapp) adorning the area just below the mountain range. While below them is where the real mapping comes in. Here we have all the different little aspects of Death’s Domain, all very dark (coloured in a purpley-black colour) and foreboding, but yet the house itself looks strangely so homely, with the smoke rising from the chimney. Adorning the edge of the mapp we have a latticework of bones, which go to frame yet more Kidby illustrations of all of Death’s family and related objet-das.

Depends who you are and what you are looking for really. The mini-book is a very good accompaniment to the mapp, simply because it is very descriptive and the mapp is an illustration and the two combine nicely. I am sure that the avid Discworld fan will learn from it, and that some of what is mentioned within will surface in the near future in a Discworld book. So, readers of this will know what Terry is babbling on about when he does make reference to anything contained within Death’s Domain. Personally I liked it. Mainly because the mapp and mini-book complement each other well. I do not however feel that Terry’s writing skills are fully flowering in this type of publication. It to me is better when the picture is in your mind and Terry describes things in the little ways he does throughout a book. The picture builds slowly from start to finish, bits falling into place all the way through. If you can afford the £6.99 though, I would tell you to go and buy this mapp, I believe it is the best so far.