Talking cover art

 

I think I now have twelve books out there in the wild, if you count my two collections, and as they've been published by - lemme see - five different publishers, they have some very different cover art. (And then there are the foreign editions, which are completely different again.) I've definitely loved some covers more than others, and I've also been far more involved in the development of some covers than others. There was one book that was up on Amazon before I'd even seen the cover design... 

When PS Publishing's Absinthe imprint took on my novella Steal Me, I was thrilled (and grateful) to be involved in the process. The cover art is by World Fantasy Award-winning British illustrator John Coulthart and I have to say, I absolutely love it! I think it captures the essence of the book perfectly. Supernatural Tales' recent review of Steal Me asks: Who are the superficially nice old ladies who run the shop? Where do they come from? What do they want? and the cover manages to hint at all of that without any spoilers - if you take a really close look at the old lady on the cover, you'll see a few hints that she isn't all she seems. John has given her a doll-like look that is unsettling and suggests that what we see is artificial. 

Take a look at the full cover and you'll see that the back has the name of the bookshop - Legends - as it would appear on the shop window. That weirdly spiky text is not actually a standard font - John found it in an old lettering book called Art Alphabets and Lettering, by JM Bergling. John says of this: "I think I may have said before that it's good sometimes to look for unusual sources instead of choosing a font equivalent. Font designers keep making digital versions of old lettering designs - many of them specialise in this - but there are still plenty of old designs that haven't yet been digitised." That is the sort of attention to detail that I really love about John's work. It also feels a wee bit meta - it kind of makes the book itself, which is about a cursed bookshop and all the ominous books in it, into an item with an archaic heritage. 

John has actually done a cover illustration for one of my books before, and that was Atmospheric Disturbances (Swan River Press), which came out late in 2024. The peerless Brian J. Showers, who runs Swan River, very much involved me in the process of developing cover art and I probably drove the poor bloke bananas by being so fussy. I've blogged about Swan River covers before as they are very varied. Some of them are very sharply realistic looking, and others are impressionistic, and I have to say that I personally like the sharp, detailed ones the best. So we looked at various very impressionistic styles, which to be fair can be excellent for suggesting vaguely sinister and weird things, but they weren't really doing it for me. Brian kindly did not throw the entire project in Dublin bay and stump away swearing under his breath. In the end he came up with John Coulthart. 

I think the Atmospheric Disturbances cover is gorgeous, and all those little squares (there are more on the back of the book) represent the different stories. There's one about the Paris Catacombs, one about petrospheres... you get the drift. 

The things I really love about John's work are the clarity and detail. There's a kind of cleanness, a sharp edge, about the lines. I've always really liked that sort of thing (one of my favourite painters is Hans Holbein the Younger!). You can see a lot of examples of this on John's website. 

I asked John about this and he said: "The hard-edged look I always think of as the Michael Whelan style since he's an exemplar of this kind of painting, but there are plenty of other artists doing similar things. I've spent most of this year working on a series of book illustrations in the same style." He added: "It's taken me a while to get used to doing this using digital materials. I used to work with acrylic paints which give a similar look but the process is obviously very different. Not everyone wants such a hard look, however. I've just done a poster for a group of Irish film-makers which they wanted to look more nebulous and diffuse. I try to be flexible."

👻

STEAL ME, says the book...

STEAL ME, says the book. 

Rowan is holding it open with her two hands, and she feels the tremor that passes through them. Her eyes widen. Warmth floods into her face and she feels sure she must be going red, guiltily red, as though everyone in the bookshop can read her thoughts. As though she’s responsible for what it says in large bold letters at the top of the page. 

She closes her eyes, squeezing them tight shut, and counts to seven—her lucky number, the number of fairytales and magic. Then she opens them again and reads: 

STEAL ME. You know you want to. 

Thus begins my brand new novella, available to order now from PS Publishing. Steal Me is about a gorgeous looking bookshop that opens on the high street of a small Scottish town, exciting comment from both book lovers and prophets of financial doom alike. It's a shop with a book for everyone -but it's also a shop you don't want opening anywhere near you, believe me! 

Steal Me comes to you thanks to Marie O'Regan, an award-nominated writer and editor who is Managing Editor of Absinthe Books, an imprint of PS dedicated to the novella. 

It has cover art from John Coulthart, who also created the cover for my recent collection Atmospheric Disturbances, from Swan River Press. I absolutely love John's work and was thrilled when he agreed to do the cover of Steal Me!

I'll be blogging about both Marie and John in the next few days as there is so much more that I want to say about them and I can't fit it all in one blog post. 

Meantime, I'd like to talk a little bit about book locations! If you happen to have read any of my previous books, you'll probably know that I get a lot of inspiration from real life places. My first ever novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, was set in the German town of Bad Münstereifel, where I and my family lived for seven years. Bad M is an amazing place, full of history and absolutely wild folklore, and so it wasn't surprising that those things worked their way out as a book. 

Later, we moved to Flanders and I set some of my later books there (guess where Demons of Ghent is set? heh), and after that we moved to Scotland, where we have been ever since. Before Steal Me I had already created fictional mayhem in my sleepy part of Perthshire, with my novels Ghost, Too Near The Dead and Jump Cut. Steal Me continues this trend, with the arrival of Legends bookshop in a small town suspiciously like the one I live in. 

You can see some of the locations that inspired the book in this video!

Of course, the town in the book isn't exactly like my home town. It's more loosely based on it. The library isn't like the one in the book, which is an older building right in the centre - we actually have a modern community campus library on the edge of town. There used to be an older library in the town, but it is now the local arts centre, and it isn't in the spot where the library is located in the book either. So there's a bit of switching around, but the one thing I did want to do is accurately represent a small town with heart - one you'd fight for, as my heroine, Rowan, decides to do. 

Ever since I started writing full time, I've been very influenced by my environment. I spend quite a lot of time walking about (this was especially true during the pandemic) and if I see something interesting, it often sparks ideas. Sometimes these are quite ominous ideas! I think the classic case is the block of flats I used to pass on a particular bus journey. One window in this block was full of Spiderman memorabilia, and I often used to think how cute it was that some little kid's mum had indulged his mania for Spiderman to that extent. Then one day I thought: yeah, but supposing he's 50 and his mum is 80, and she won't let him out??? 

It's all about the way you look at things, I guess. In Steal Me I looked at my quiet, largely predictable, mostly respectable little town, and saw some monsters peeping out. I hope you'll enjoy reading about them! 

EasterCon Belfast

I do not have very much experience of attending conventions. I did once attend one in Glasgow to keep my daughter company; I can't even remember which con it was, although I do remember the guy in the very convincing Pyramid Head costume. (Apparently people put Pyramid Head on their hear-me-out cakes but I'm not going to be doing that any time soon. Brrrr.) Anyway, I decided I really ought to dip my toe in the water. I love so much of the stuff that is celebrated and I actually write horror and fantasy, for goodness' sake. So last weekend I went to EasterCon in Belfast.

The journey there was a bit of an Odyssey. I decided to travel in an eco friendly way, so I opted for the ferry from Cairnryan. This would have been fine, except I rang the ferry company to check there would be parking at the terminal, and they said they couldn't guarantee it. It was Easter weekend, after all. So my long suffering husband had to drive me down there. Then the ferry was late (and quite raucous). I arrived in Belfast feeling a bit the worse for wear, to find that the bus had left 90 minutes before and there wasn't another one for ages. Eventually I shelled out for a taxi. I suppose I could consider that entire journey a penance to Gaia or something. On the way home I had to fly; I just couldn't make the logistics work. 

I had two panels arranged for the weekend. When I looked at the programme I realised that other people had scheduled far more events, but being a newbie I didn't want to overdo it. One of the panels was "Lost Films, Old Tech: The Appeal of Analogue Horror" and the other one was "X Never, Ever Marks the Spot: Archaeology in Speculative Fiction". 

Anyway, here's the Old Tech panel. Left to right: friendly tech person, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Williamson, Lynda E. Rucker (moderator), me, Ben Unsworth.

                   

(Pic with thanks to Ben Unsworth)

Big thanks to Lynda for her excellent moderation! I enjoyed this panel so much, especially since I got to talk about some of my favourite obsessions, including M.R.James (yes! there is tech in his stories!) and recent film Broadcast Signal Intrusion. I've been interested in old technology in books and films for a long time (see previous blog post on novels about old movies), probably since hearing Aaron Worth (Associate Professor at Boston University) speaking about the "Haunted Cinematography of M.R.James" at a conference in 2015. 

One of the things Aaron Worth highlighted was the uniquely ominous character of outdated technology: the grainy images, the crackling soundtrack. I have to agree with this; I think, for example, that Nosferatu (1922) is still frightening in spite of being superseded by modern special effects, because it is palpably ancient. There is a dark griminess to it, as though it is something excavated from a bad place. Film technology is now old enough to take the place of handwritten documents and antique engravings in supernatural fiction, particularly given that we do not necessarily want to put apparitions and phenomena too far into the past: M.J.James himself commented "It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective." His phantoms are often of relatively recent date, and nowadays that would put them firmly in the era of the moving image. Arguably also film is the latest form of the "uncanny valley"; the moving image looks exactly like a person but isn't a living person.  

As mentioned, there is a surprising amount of tech in M.R.James's stories (cameras, trams etc). But undoubtedly the most unsettling piece of technology is the magic lantern show which Mr. Karswell puts on for the village children in "Casting the Runes". It prefigures the terrifying moment in The Ring  (2002) when Samara crawls out of the TV screen:

"He switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling sound which sent the children nearly mad."

"Casting the Runes" was published in 1911, by which time movies were well established. Magic lanterns were still in use but had been technically overtaken by more sophisticated media, so they were already old tech. 

Anyway, that was a massive digression! As you can see, the problem with this topic is not getting me to talk about it; it's getting me to shut up...

The Archaeology panel took place half an hour after the Old Tech one ended, and alas, I do not have a picture of it. It was moderated by Liz Bourke and featured David Hodson, Sharan Volin, Kari Sperring (Maund) and me. 

I have a lot of thoughts about archaeology in speculative fiction and films; far more thoughts, in fact, than I was able to squeeze into my panel contributions! So I might blog about those separately. The general consensus (unsurprisingly) was that archaeology in books and films isn't much like real life archaeology. My son is a field archaeologist working here in Scotland, and as I remarked during the panel, if anyone made a realistic film based on what he does, it would be about three weeks long and the protagonist would spend most of that time standing next to a trench in a hard hat and steel toe capped boots; in the last reel they would discover a few places where the earth was a different colour, indicating that wooden posts had once been there. Those Indiana Jones-type movies where archaeologists rush about grabbing precious artefacts, or have to decipher arcane scripts at high speed with everyone screaming at them, are not true to life. But you know what? The excitement is real. I can get very passionate about petrospheres and Viking burials, even if nobody zoomed in and snatched them from under the nose of a bunch of villains.

A propos, I have written several stories featuring archaeology in one way or another, and you can listen to one of them in this recording by David Longhorn: "Gold" - two others, "The Valley of Achor" and "The Edge of the World" (in which I offer an explanation for the mysterious purpose of petrospheres) can be found in my collection Atmospheric Disturbances from Swan River Press. 

Other highlights included attending a very interesting panel on the topic of "Irish Mythology and Horror" (had to be done, didn't it?) and bagging a signed Adrian Tchaikovsky book for my daughter.

I also spent quite a lot of time hanging out at the Swan River Press stand in the Dealers' Room, where the indefatigable Brian J. Showers (below) presented some truly gorgeous volumes and could also be persuaded to blether for hours and hours about books, publishing, and conventions. 

Anyway, that was my first proper Con - let's hope it's the first of many! 

Cover art beauty contest!

Last weekend I was at EasterCon in Belfast, a topic I may blog about later if I can squeeze the time in (April is a bit mad this year). I'm very new to the world of conventions, so I only did two panels and spent quite a lot of time hanging out in the Dealers' Room, and specifically at the Swan River Press stand. 

SWP produced my two short story collections, The Sea Change (2013) and Atmospheric Disturbances (2024). I was particularly thrilled with the AD cover, designed by John Coulthart and featuring little cameos from all the stories. Brian, who runs SWP, had rolled his eyes a little over my design input; I wanted something 'clean and crisp', he recalled, but, he said, "What does 'crisp' even mean?" Well, whatever it means, I think the design nailed it. 

Anyway, while I was at the Con I naturally had a lot of time to look at the books on display, and to talk about them with passers-by. The funny thing was, nobody could agree about which was the most beautiful one. The covers are all strikingly different and so were all the opinions. 

My personal favourite (apart from Atmospheric Disturbances) is the cover for Old Albert, created by Jason Zerrillo. Apparently the original photo couldn't be used - wrong dimensions or something - so Jason recreated it. I absolutely love the way the strong, almost toxic yellow of the birds stands out against the grey background. I kept picking the book up and admiring it, until someone very unreasonably bought it! 

Take a look at some of the Swan River covers (below) and see what you think! I'd love to know which cover appeals to you the most. 

Of course, these are not all the books that SWP has produced. You can see them all on https://swanriverpress.ie/titles/ - perhaps you'll like one of the other covers even better!

Left to right: Atmospheric Disturbances by Helen Grant, cover art by John Coulthart; 

The Dark Return of Time by R.B.Russell, cover art by Jason Zerrillo; 

Old Albert by Brian J. Showers, cover art by Jason Zerrillo. 

Left to right: Friends and Spectres, ed. Robert Lloyd Parry, cover art by John Coulthart; Longsword by Thomas Leland, cover art by Ellen McDermott; Uncertainties 6, ed. Brian J. Showers, cover art by David Tibet.

Left to right: The Ruins of Contracoeur by Joyce Carole Oates, cover art by Meggan Kehrli; Treatises on Dust by Timothy J. Jarvis, cover art by øjeRum; Selected Stories by Mark Valentine, cover art by Jason Zerrillo. 

Left to right: A Flowering Wound by John Howard, cover art by Jason Zerrillo; Now It's Dark by Lynda E.Rucker, cover art by John Coulthart; Sparks From The Fire by Rosalie Parker, cover art by R.B.Russell. 

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden: fifteen year anniversary!

Fifteen years ago today - on 2nd April 2009 - my very first novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden was published in the UK. It seems incredible to say that - I can't believe so much time has passed! The book was inspired by the real life history, legends and topography of the little town of Bad Münstereifel in Germany, where I and my family had been living since 2001. The locations in the novel are all real ones, and in fact if you want to see them, I did a video walking tour of the town a couple of years after the book came out. You can see it here: YouTube tour

I absolutely loved living in Bad Münstereifel. We originally moved out there for 2 years for my husband's job, but ended up staying for 7, and even so, I cried bitterly when we left. It turned out that our new home in Flanders would inspire three more books, but that's another story...

Anyway, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a tribute to one of the places I love best in all the world, and to a large extent it is also a portrait of the place at the time we lived there. Much has changed since. After we had departed for Belgium, the town became a "City Outlet", which no doubt brought in many commercial benefits but also meant that some of the shops and cafés in the book no longer exist. Then in 2021 there was appalling flooding which caused widespread damage in the town. I believe restoration work is still going on. Also, of course, a period of fifteen years brings other changes - it's hard to imagine the young heroine Pia and her sidekick Stefan not having mobile phones if the book were set now. And the dangerous turret in the ruined castle on the hill above the town now has a huge metal cage over it to stop people falling in. 

The folk character "Unshockable Hans" who appears in the novel and inspires Pia's investigation is a genuine one. Back when I was writing the book, I came across him in several books written about local Eifel legends, and so I went to the Eifel Club library in Düren and read up about him from very old issues of the Eifel Club newsletter. I recall that in addition to being written in rather old-fashioned German, they were also published in an eye-watering Gothic type which made my progress through them very slow! 

The book was - and is - categorised as YA, at least in the UK (in other countries it was sold as an adult title), but I didn't write it with a specifically young adult audience in mind and I know that it has had at least as many adult readers over the years. It went on to be shortlisted for the Cilip Carnegie medal and the Booktrust Teenage prize, and won an ALA Alex award in the USA (Alex awards are given to books written for adults with a special appeal to young adults). 

Since the book came out, I have had a further nine novels published, plus one short story collection, with more works in the pipeline. My most recent novels have all been firmly aimed at an adult audience, and set in Scotland, where I have lived for well over a decade. But The Vanishing of Katharina Linden will always have a special place in my heart, and I'll be raising a glass to it this evening. 

Below: the US cover