Roundtable: By The Cover

Let’s be honest: despite the adage, we are all guilty of occasionally judging books by the cover. We know we shouldn’t, but sometimes, we just can’t help ourselves. This month’s roundtable topic was suggested by Nicole Taft, bookseller par excellence. She sees a lot of book covers, and wanted to talk about books that we, as readers, picked up simply based on the cover. It’s so easy to be tempted, with such interesting covers floating around out there:

Some of them are beautiful. Some of them are fascinating. Some of them make you want to tilt your head to one side and politely ask what in the hell is going on?

With that in mind, let’s find out what we’re “guilty” of picking up because of a shiny, shiny cover.

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Nicole: Several years ago I saw a tweet from Tor that celebrated the cover release for author Victor Milan’s new book, The Dinosaur Lords. I may have done some ooh-ing and aah-ing when I first saw it. Created by Richard Anderson, it’s got this kind of wispy yet violent style, and I was drawn to it immediately. I’ve been able to identify work from that Anderson since, which is always fun to do. With a roaring t-rex or some kind of raptor on the front and a knight in armor brandishing a flag mounted on top, it looked exciting. Badass. And with a little quote up top from George R.R. Martin himself proclaiming the story to be “a cross between Jurassic Park and Game of Thrones,” hell yes I was intrigued.

The book wasn’t even out, but I made a mental note of it because I really wanted to read it. I finally got my chance (luckily, since I work in a bookstore, it’s easy to check and see when a book will be in as well as be the first to snatch it). I was super excited, and also suffering from a medical issue at the time, so I had plenty of time to read it.

The downside is that I was sadly unimpressed with the book. For as fantastic as its cover was, the story never hooked me. A lot of things in the book bothered me and I barely hung on until the end. Though the next two books’ covers are equally appealing, I never did go back to finish the series so I have no idea how anything ends. The sad part is that I don’t much care.

On the upside, I got to know the name and work of a skilled artist. The kind that, if I stumbled across his booth at a convention, I’d seriously have to consider reorganizing the space on my walls to accommodate more art.

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Nancy: When it comes to my reading habits, I usually play it safe. If I pick up a book it’s because it’s written by an author I like, or it’s part of a series that I’m into, or it was highly recommended to me/has received good reviews, or, at the very least, has shown up a dozen times on my goodreads feed. As a result, I almost never pick up a book based solely on the cover art. But when this topic came up, my brain immediately went to one book specifically: Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder.

While this fantasy novel has had multiple gorgeous covers since it was first published, there was just something about the initial artwork that really grabbed me. I’m not sure what it was exactly. Was it the various shade of red (one of my favorite colors) that could be found throughout the cover? The mysterious expression of the heroine’s face, indicating that she had an interesting story to tell? Or maybe it was the attention-grabbing title, Poison Study, displayed in a warm shade of gold? Regardless, I was intrigued, and being a mass market paperback, it wasn’t that expensive. So, I took a chance and picked it up. Fortunately, this tale of a young woman who is forced to become a poison tester for the Commander of Ixia ended up being just as addictive as the cover suggested — as did the following books in the series. Over a decade later, it remains one of my favorite books.

Sometimes, it’s worth taking the risk on a pretty cover alone.

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Ronya: I’m a very visual person but pretty set in my ways. I have favorite artists and favorite tastes. If I didn’t have a penchant for browsing covers, I might never find new stuff. You never know what gem you might find just based on the cover art. I like covers for the nostalgia of what I remember about a story and for considering the future mystery of the contents. The joy of browsing to discover titles is just as important as the act of reading books, listening to music or watching TV or movies. In SF/F/H, the world is a character, too, and readers have to buy into that world as much as the story itself. Covers can contribute to or elaborate on the story’s worldbuilding. But, also, 99% of the time, blurbs lie. This is why I enjoy following hashtag games such as #explainafilmplotbadly or “old” memes such as the now-famous, yes-it-was-actually-published review of The Wizard of Oz.

Cover art is how I discovered Melissa Scott, Jack McDevitt, and countless other authors and musicians. If I had to pick one thing for a “Because Of The Cover Art” Award, though, it has to be Jack McDevitt’s Engines of God — the original 1994 paperback, not the reissue from a few years ago. Everything is in that slice of art: a giant lizard-like statue complete with alien writing on the base, situated at the foot of barren mountains; an explorer in a space suit on a derelict road, startled by the statue; and Saturn in the backdrop. Why, is that a leftover artifact from a long-forgotten alien civilization, and is that an archaeologist? Sign me up. This cover promises a monumental (couldn’t resist!) mystery — and one that didn’t disappoint. McDevitt packed a lot of action in those pages, in the guise of a space archaeology expedition working under a deadline, and it turns out the cover art represents the catalyst for a cosmic mystery unraveled in the last two-thirds of the book (and which drove the plot of a subsequent book, Omega, published in 2003). It launched the “career” of Priscilla “Hutch” Hutchins, McDevitt’s spacefaring pilot who traversed several books and who became one of my favorite SF characters.

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Lane: So December 2014, I’m wandering through a Barnes and Noble, as one does, and I stop in the fiction section on the way to SF/F because a book has caught my eye.

The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero. A super pretty book. Do not look at the new cover which is just yuck. (Editor’s note: link provided for those who want to see the yuck! And Lane is not wrong!) A green maze with red eyes? Whatever. Look at the beautiful cover that made me pick up this book. Look at that scrollwork on the gates! Look at all those evocative words running along the edges of the image! Now imagine all those lines glinting faintly as some of them are picked out in foil. Now imagine that it’s that perfect textured cover, soft and vaguely sandy feeling. Not slick. Not rough. The kind of book you just enjoy holding.

Really, the cover sold the book to me. There was a comparison to House of Leaves, which I always side-eye. (I was right; the better comparison would have been to a Tim Powers novel.) I carried this damned book all through the store for my entire shopping experience thinking, it’s a hardback. It’s expensive. It’s by an author I don’t know. And a glance inside let me know that a lot of it was told in first person, present tense. Which I don’t like. Also? I wasn’t even shopping for myself!

I bought the book, of course I bought it. I’d held it so long it thought it was mine and would have followed me home.

Worth it! The Supernatural Enhancements ended up being one of my favorite reads of 2014, and so strange that when he came out with his next book (also with a striking cover that gives me an excuse to use the word lurid) I bought Meddling Kids the moment I saw it.

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Kristina: I’ve often heard that when covers are designed, the artist only has the words of the publisher to work with. Sometimes it’s as much as a synopsis, and other times, a brief description. If that’s the case with Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper, the cover seems even more extraordinary to me because it nails a lot of the book’s motifs. Plus, it’s gorgeous.

The novel is rife with treatises on beauty and aesthetics, as such philosophies are integral to both characterization and plot. The portrait of the young woman on the cover is emblematic of this, representing the Victorian sensibilities of the time. This is also very much a novel of women and their relationships with each other as they find their purpose in the world, so it’s an obvious choice to feature a woman on the cover.

Botany also plays an important part in the story, as it is integral to the magic system in the book. When you contract with demons, you sustain the relationship between their world and yours through something tangible – in this case, plants. The single bright bloom on the cover reminds me of the tenuous promise of reward when characters make their diabolical deals; the darkness of the stems and leaves and otherwise dried-out flowers suggests that there’s a cost to the bargain – destruction and death is the price for the experience of true beauty.

Lastly, the snakes and spiders throughout the cover are symbols both demonic and deadly, but given their naturalist renderings, they look just as beautiful as they are scary.

So much information is packed into a single cover! Everything points toward a story that would be lush and dark that brushed the realms of fantasy. But what the cover fails to convey is how much of the novel is not the stuff of darkness — the pastoral beginning, the comedy of manners, romance and love unrequited, etc. To sound as stereotypically Victorian as I can: “The whole thing is rather much a lark.”

While every chapter of the book opens with an epigraph from the fictional On the Summoning of Demons, readers must wade through nearly 200 pages before they get a true taste of the demons themselves. The book is 358 pages, by the way.

While we get hints of darkness here and there, especially toward the end, much of the book consists of sisterly disagreements, silly crushes, a lot of “Oh, tosh!” and large bouts of explanation — especially about art and aesthetics. Not so much about the demons themselves, or the promises they make, or the wholly unique magic system Tanzer has created.

For me, the cover perfectly fits the novel, yet it doesn’t. Everything on the cover is in the novel, but it only represents a mere fraction of it. It’s not that the book wasn’t an enjoyable read, but the cover promised something that I personally feel the book failed to deliver.

Nonetheless, like the characters in the novel, I too may waste away in front of the gorgeous portrait as the rest of the (book) world passes me by. The cover is a genuine a pleasure to look at, and one of my all-time favorites.

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Kelly: Since I started doing book reviews for Speculative Chic, I constantly browse through the science fiction/fantasy section of my local Barnes & Noble. I picked up Michael Poore’s Reincarnation Blues purely because of its unique and vibrantly colorful cover. The artwork is done in primary colors of blue, yellow, red, and green set against a black backdrop. There is a cat, a crown, a moon, and a comet in yellow. A blue whale and shark swim in a green ocean next to a red ant and butterfly. A futuristic city sets next to a castle. A green railroad leads into the abyss in front of a cracked heart. The bright neon colors and the city outlines made me think of Las Vegas. The cover is quite busy, but it intrigued me enough to pick the novel up and read its premise.

Always the frugal consumer, I put the book down and went home to reserve it at the library. In Reincarnation Blues, humans get 10,000 opportunities to live a perfect live, attain perfection, and merge with the Oversoul. The main character, Milo, is on his 9,995th chance. Milo is also dating an incarnation of Death named Suzie. Although I enjoyed the book, Reincarnation Blues doesn’t live up to the awesome promise of its cover. In the first chapter, Milo is eaten by a shark who “had been an ocean perch in a former life. It had been food of all kinds. It had been the Strawberry Queen for the 1985 Strawberry Festival in Troy, Ohio” (p.6). But sharks who were former beauty queens are quickly exchanged for more conventional storylines about Milo struggling to grow up in various points throughout human history. I found myself wishing that Poore had tried harder. It’s briefly mentioned that Milo has lived as a woman, a catfish, and a cricket, but every time we see one of his lives fleshed out, he is always a man named Milo who is a bit of a basic bro. Even though the cover is better than the book, I still think that the offbeat humor and unusual premise in Reincarnation Blues would make for a good beach read. Read my full review at right here.