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.
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8 comments:

  1. Tulkinghorn22 November 2009 at 18:08

    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.

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  2. Bob Fingerman22 November 2009 at 19:22

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

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  3. Bob Fingerman22 November 2009 at 19:26

    I guess they both like A.E. Housman.

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  4. JRSM22 November 2009 at 19:34

    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.

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  5. Bob Fingerman22 November 2009 at 23:43

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

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  6. JRSM23 November 2009 at 14:36

    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.

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  7. Anonymous14 December 2009 at 17:01

    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.

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  8. Craig D.7 March 2010 at 12:19

    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.

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