Sunday 22 November 2009

Ellroy, Good and Bad

I have to thank sharp-eyed reader Ian Rogers for drawing the following to my attention: the atmospheric, eye-catching and vivid new James Ellroy cover from the US (it's a Knopf, so possibly a Chip Kidd design?)...




..and the rather ugly UK equivalent, which has no credited designer, and which on first glance appears to be a beanbag eating a man's arm on TV.



That could have been an effective image, if it had full-bleed to the edges of the cover, but something has gone awfully wrong.

8 comments:

Tulkinghorn said...

Yes. Chip Kidd.

Shows the virtues of longevity and design with bones, if you will.

The new book is volume three of a trilogy, the first volume of which was published in 1995.

Kidd did all the covers, which resemble one another... The books without covers have an identical design for the spine.

Bob Fingerman said...

The sequel to Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog was called Blood's a Rover.

Bob Fingerman said...

I guess they both like A.E. Housman.

JRSM said...

Tulkinghorn--thanks for confirming the hunch. I'll have to find those other covers.

Bob--I didn't even know there WAS a sequel to that, though I did just reread the original over the weekend, since it was in this collection of post-nuclear stories from the 1980s which I found, 'Beyond Armageddon', edited bad-temperedly by Walter M Miller.

Bob Fingerman said...

I haven't seen that collection. Worth a look?

JRSM said...

Yeah, it's pretty good--recently reprinted as part of this series of post-nuke fiction (http://tinyurl.com/yg2vnkv). It's got Ellison, Clarke, Ward Moore, Wyndham, Lucius Shepard, Zelazny, Ballard, Bradbury--most of the biggies. I'd probably read about 1/3 of the stories elsewhere, but it's nice to have them all in one spot for some serious post-nuclear wallowing.

Anonymous said...

Actually I like the second one better than the first. It's weirder. The first one just looks like a million other books out there.

Craig D. said...

I love the second cover simply because I love it when the "from the author of..." on the cover doesn't refer to one the author's most popular works. Blood's a Rover isn't "from the best-selling author of L.A. Confidential" but "from the best-selling author of The Cold Six Thousand." Brilliant.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go see the new Alice in Wonderland movie. I hear it was made by the director of Vincent and Frankenweenie.