Bad Book Cover Fridays

Foreign-language editions of fantasy novels tend to be particularly fertile grounds for weird book covers. And man, I love Scandinavian illustration, but I have to make a sweeping generalization here and assert that their covers tend to be the loopiest. Here’s the Danish paperback cover of Meredith Ann Pierce’s Birth of the Firebringer (which is the first book in one of my favorite trilogies, so this is another case in which I can vouch for the cover being accurate in its details, yet not… shall we say, entirely representative of the book as a whole):

50% cute, 50% acid-trip unhinged. I don’t think I want to be friends with these unicorns - they look like they’d shake me down for my lunch money, then threaten to cut me if I told.

Yet at the same time, I kind of want a bag with them on it.

Go to:
Bad Book Covers Friday Archive
BBCF: The Saga of Recluce
BBCF: Moonsinger’s Friends
BBCF: The Alphabet Mysteries
BBCF: Diamond Star

Apologies for actually missing Friday - it’s been a long week. To make up for it, for this week’s Bad Book Cover Friday, I’m covering (har [?]) a series that Kakaner has been begging me to do pretty much since the beginning - L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s The Saga of Recluce.

These covers actually work the best without much commentary, so prepare for some scrolling -

Read the rest of this entry »

Not gonna lie, this one makes me smile at the same time that it makes me wince. Some things are so awesomely dated that you can’t help but love them.

Technically, it’s not bad, it’s just very… very.

Go to:
Bad Book Covers Friday Archive
BBCF: The Alphabet Mysteries
BBCF: Diamond Star
BBCF: The God Engines
BBCF: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

For this week’s Bad Book Cover Friday, we have the covers of Sue Grafton’s alphabet mystery series, a.k.a. the Kinsey Millhone novels. Kakaner referred me to these for the purposes of BBCF, and ever since then I can’t stop seeing them in used book sale piles everywhere.

Deeply mediocre, in a “we had no budget so we gave our cover designs to a 6th grader with Word Art pretensions” kind of way. Simplicity has its advantages in terms of recognizability, of course - as evidenced by my inability to not see these everywhere now - but. well. You could try to make it look a little less like you spent 5 minutes in Photoshop per cover doing these.

Also, on first look, the juxtaposition of the title and the cover blurb on the above cover made me think that “refreshing heroine” referred to the titular corpse. Did this happen to anyone else?

A couple more under the cut…

Read the rest of this entry »

For this week’s Bad Book Cover Friday, I present the cover of Catherine Asaro’s Diamond Star:

Yet again. Yes, the book is actually about rock stars in space (rather, a rock star in space). And it actually sounds like a very entertaining, cleverly conceived book, too. Unfortunately, when the cover artist was told “futuristic,” s/he seems to have settled on “the 80’s” as the nearest approximation. And so we are granted the bargain-bin equivalent of the love child of David Bowie and the vampire Lestat as our cover boy.

Let’s just hope that proximity to cosmic! star! light! won’t reduce his sperm count as much as those pants will, because then where would we be? Deprived of a new generation of starlets with mullets, that’s where.

- E

Go to:
Bad Book Covers Friday Archive
BBCF: The God Engines
BBCF: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16
BBCF: The Gathering Storm

By request of Kakaner, the star of this week’s Bad Book Covers Friday (an hour and a bit late by my timezone; whoops) is the unreleased* version of the cover of John Scalzi’s The God Engines, released by Subterranean Press:

Missing the baby-fresh complexion, the rosy glow that once graced your youth? Just try stripping down to a loincloth, wrapping yourself in chains, and screaming as block letters loom over your forehead and you, too, can feel fresh and perky once more. Your pores won’t just open - they’ll scream for mercy. Side effects may include washboard abs, inhuman rage, and neckbeard.

From what I’ve gathered of the plot, this cover is actually a fairly accurate representation of what occurs in the book (I won’t go so far as to say “what the book is about”). So yes, one part of me rejoices in those cover artists who actually produce something remotely relevant to the contents of the books they illustrate. The rest of me is wishing that this one didn’t make something that looks like the dreams of a ninth-grade boy who just overdosed on Dragon Ball Z and Pepto-Bismol.

The best/only good part of this cover disaster is that Subterranean Press later released a very, very delicately worded admission that the cover was Not What They Were Expecting, and shortly thereafter presented a different cover illustration for the actual printing:

“Our previous cover to John Scalzi’s dark fantasy novella, The God Engines, didn’t quite convey the spirit of the tale, so we’ve had it redone by SubPress favorite Vincent Chong.”

“Didn’t quite convey the spirit of the tale,” you say… Ah well, blessings upon independent presses that a. have the taste and b. actually take the time to effect quality control. That is dedication.

Also, is it just me or has the running theme for all the BBCF’s so far been “stuff that’s screaming and/or thrusting fists in the air”?

* corrected from “first-edition;” thank you to the scarily fast John Scalzi for pointing this out.

Go to:
Bad Book Covers Friday Archive

Stephen Jones’ Mammoth Book of Best New Horror is a wonderfully edited series of collections (I reviewed #16 here), but 1. the title blows and 2. the covers are, predictably, hit or very, very, very miss. The following cover fails both at having taste, and at being any kind of horrrifying other than the “I can’t believe somebody thought this was awesome; please buy me new retinas” kind.

GRINCH BAT IS MADE OF LIME GUMMIS AND WANTS TO SUCK YOUR BLOOD.

- E

Go to:
Bad Book Covers Friday Archive
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16, ed. Stephen Jones (2005) [E]

Friday again already? How time flies when you’re not sleeping regularly… but I wouldn’t know anything about that, not with my stupendous skills of time management.

Anyway, per Anda’s request, here’s our second installment of Bad Book Cover Fridays - from Robert Jordan’s notoriously lengthy Wheel of Time saga, it’s the cover of the twelfth volume, The Gathering Storm:

“FUUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUU STOOOOOOOOOORM”

Watch out - someone (we presume the storm) already ruined his house. Make fun of his skinny jeans and sausage-casing-like tunic and he might just punch you with his tiny fists.

Presumably we should all be stirred to action against willfully destructive storms - especially those gathering ones, they’re the worst - by his righteous indignation, but… nope, still can’t get over the t-rex arms.

- E

Go to:
Bad Book Covers Friday Archive

Being the inaugural post of a feature that Kakaner and I have wanted to launch, oh, for about as long as we’ve wanted to have a book blog on which to launch it. Bad Book Cover Fridays! A weekly injection of terrible, calculated to help us crawl that last, gasping distance to the weekend. Most of our subject matter will be fantasy and sci-fi, given our typical reading patterns - and yes, it is almost depressingly easy to make fun of genre covers in general, but some are really asking for it - but of course we’ll probably end up dipping our toes in other suspiciously murky bodies of water, too.

And now for exhibit A, the original American cover of Robin Hobb’s Mad Ship (1998):

Would you like a little homoerotic with that rearing sea serpent and straining, tufty-chested figurehead? Oh wait, the person hanging off of his bondage I mean rigging is actually a woman. She seems to be a good hand with that phallic I mean boathook though - plunge it straight into the pink, fleshy folds between Nessie’s lips, that’s it.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that bad, at least not in that way, and I’m just betraying my own interpretive proclivities - but there is something inherently hilarious about Mr. Figurehead’s stiffly horrified pose. It seems more along the lines of “OH my god I just walked in on my roommate playing Wii Fit in the buff” than “OH my god mortal peril.”

This is the kind of overly literal epic fantasy book cover that I always end up trying to hide with my palm as I read. (And I have, in fact, been reading this series, so… one day soon, it’s going to come to this.) This is also one of those covers that, in the mysterious way of fantasy reprints, ends up becoming progressively tackier and more lurid. Second edition:

It’s like it took a whole step… back. Into the 70’s. Hmm. Extra kudos on the embossed metallic font.

- E

Go to:

Bad Book Covers Friday Archive