More Long Midnight Covers
Added on 11 October 2008
One of my concerns with the four original designs for the reprint of The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson was that they were all very sombre. Very Crime Novel. The black cover was particularly bloody and mean, suggestive of a much higher brutality content than was actually there, but none of them suggested the general goofiness of the world that Barney Thomson inhabits. A world where sadistic murder is commonplace and doesn't seem to be too far above shoplifting on the naughtiness scale.I liked the idea of a danse macabre figure, which was why I was trawling through all those old Death drawings a few days ago, and asked my designer to see what she could come up with. The results are below, an extension of my favourite from the previous four designs. My favourite of this lot is the one where she has used the same bloody clawmark as she used on Lost In Juarez.... except that she's already used it for Lost in Juarez. If the books had been from the same series it would have been fine.
I was also struck by the dark cover among these four, it seemed to be more striking amidst all the grey, until I realised there was a man's bloody head wrapped in clingfilm in the background. I may have written a book where lots of people are brutally murdered, hacked to pieces, stuffed in polythene bags and put in a freezer.... but this kind of thing grosses me out. I don't want a bloody clingfilmed ear on the cover.
So now I have asked her to develop the cover with the bloody clawmark, finding another motif to replace that one, and maybe adding a bit more colour. I like her representation of Death, so Death will stay.
Getting there.
