A Cat Made of Flowers, A Fairy on a Throne of Bone

A new book from Tartarus Press, a small UK outfit that specialises in expensive but beautifully designed and edited collections of horror and weird fiction and criticism, caught my eye in their latest mailout. They don't use large images on their cover, preferring small insets on smooth fields of solid creamy colour, but the image they did use was quite startling.

At first I thought this was a computer-generated image, like the unsettling digital "sculptures" of Tom Darracott, as seen on the original UK covers for Keith Ridgway's excellent Hawthorn and Child and Han Kang's also excellent The Vegetarian (the first from Granta, the second from Portobello Books).

But when I investigated the artist behind the Tartarus John Collier cover, Cedric Laquieze, I found something stranger and more beautiful. What I took to be a piece of CGI was in fact a photo of an intricate sculpture of bones and flowers.

Laquieze has done a number of strange and beautiful works of art along these lines, from fairies constructed of insect parts...

.. with some on thrones of bone..

..to more uncomfortably mammalian and human works.

That these images have not been used before for weird fiction is a great surprise--they're much more interesting then yet more tentacles and fog--and well done to Tartarus for recognising the potential.

Snow Paint

I don't know who did this cover (UPDATE: It's the work of Clare Skeats, of whose fantastic designs you can see more here), and the book's not out until next year (from Granta), but it's both simple and effective. Perhaps it's just me, but I really like the way the slightly scratchy/streaky texture of the paint mimics the hard ridges you get in ice or hard snow (especially on the left-hand side)--the kind you tread on, slip on, and and break your leg on. Click for a bigger version.

Two Takes on Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is one of my favourite living writers, and it's been too long since she last had a book out (not counting her Collected Stories which, annoyingly, I had all but three of in their seperate editions). Now, finally, her A Gate at the Stairs is out, and I got my copy in the post last night.

I ordered the US edition, rather than the slightly cheaper and easier-to-get UK edition. The reason is purely for the cover. The US Knopf edition, designed by the great Barbara de Wilde, looks like this:



For a book set in the wake of the September 11 attacks, this bleak and fiery image, empty of people, a wait for a plane that will never arrive, is just perfect (and suits the hard, dark edges of Moore's comedy).

On the other hand, the UK Faber & Faber edition, designer unknown, looks like this:




It's a bit too soft and comforting-looking, to my mind.

Incidentally, the US cover image, a photo by Kamil Vojnar was also used on the cover of issue 93 of Granta magazine.

Icy

I'm part way through Sarah Moss's Cold Earth (published by Granta), a possibly post-apocalyptic tale about a bunch of grad students trapped on an archaeological dig in remote Greenland, while the rest of the world seems to be succumbing to a horrible super-virus. It's well done so far, but having the first 100 pages narrated by a convincingly drawn neurotic pain in the arse who it's difficult to want to spend time with may have been a bit of a tactical mistake on the author's part.

In any case, it's the cover I'm here to talk about.



Designed by Mark Swan, it has extra detail you can't see from this scan--spot-varnished root patterns growing out across the white from the central text block. Even better is the way that the edges of the pages are dyed a cyanotic blue.


This means that, as you read, each page has the visual effect of a slab of white ice rising up from an cold, clear blue sea.

I can't think of any other recently published book that has had page edges dyed in this way, but it's a surprisingly effective design element.

UPDATE: Alan Trotter informs me that "Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y and PopCo have their pages dyed like this (black and blue, respectively)." (UPDATE 2: See his picture here.) And Thomas has a blurb on the front of this book. It's a dyed-page-edge conspiracy!

UPDATE 3: John Self brings back some causticity to this post in his comment, but also tells me that "Andrew thingy's [Davidson] The Gargoyle had black-edged pages hardback, and Tim Willocks' The Religion had red ones."

UPDATE 4: OK, obviously this is not as rare as I thought. Now Tom of book designers The Parish points out the design on Charlie Higson's Hurricane Gold: "The hardback ... also has gilded edges, and they are in gold. With nice embossing on gold foil on the cover, it's all gold!" And it is: