Christos Tsiolkas's gothic narrative tale, Dead Europe, uses confronting realism as well as a dark phantasy, and it incorporates many voices, imitating the carnivalesque poetics of Ancient Greek and Roman plays, while also drawing from Greek myth and folk culture. The varied ideologies represented in this text, however, are not in synchrony with these communal forms but instead reflect the psychic and social consequences when individuals are cut off from their societies and fellow human beings. So, in many ways, this tale can be read as a polemical, multi-voiced comment on human suffering, expressing the rancour and outrage found in the works of classical world writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had been influenced by various humanist philosophies.

Tsiolkas contributes to modern and contemporary literary voices on the world stage who speak against injustice and suffering, but he does so through anti-art, using a poetics that seems to scream against inequality. Together with his heightened tone, he uses the modern construct of the mediated lens of his protagonist, Isaac, a bicultural, Greek Australian artist journeying throughout Europe and recording what he sees on his camera. Instead of following the well-trodden path of landmark tourist sites, however, Isaac spe-cifically searches for and shows Europe's dark spaces, which are historically associated with the gruesome deaths of crimes against humanity.

Christos Tsiolkas shows the ugly face of human trafficking, exploitation, anti-Semitism and misogyny and focuses on the scars imprinted on human bodies and souls because of hate crimes inflicted upon powerless members of society. For this reason, he can be read not only as a multicultural writer but also as a writer of world literature who speaks for what Appadurai refers to as ‘cosmopolitanism from below’, indicating he is part of a cosmopolitan movement of transnational, underclass migrant communities in the arts, who seems to speak from both the North and the South: