Cover Art for Killers

Posted by Colin Harvey Sep 18, 2008

My debut as an editor, Killers, is published on September 19th. I'll be at the British Fantasy Society's annual con, at Nottingham in the UK. Two of the contributors and I will be giving a reading, and if all goes to plan, at 6pm Rocky Mountain Time, I'll be making my debut on the radio as a guest of Ken Hudnall's show in El Paso, Texas.

We set up a contributors group on Yahoo which allowed the writers to talk to one another. The subject which aroused the most contention was the cover art. Until it came to posting it, I'd taken the cover art as much for granted as much as most people do. Yet we have a set of conventions for it, just as we do for most other things in publishing.

In the UK especially, most crime cover art is photographic. Horror and fantastic fiction -by contrast- is drawn.

So when we came to decide on the cover art for a cross-genre anthology, which genre did we represent? The fantastic, or crime? Because Killers features SF, fantasy and horror, any bow to one sub-genre would be unrepresentative of the others.

Because all the stories were crime or thrillers, albeit tinged with the fantastic, so it seemed a no-brainer to represent the crime/thriller genre. We elected on a photograph that would carry a tinge of strangeness.

But understandably some of the horror writers felt that we'd taken a wrong turning, perhaps disappointed that the mental images that contributed to their own stories weren't adequately represented. Most (hopefully) reached an accomodation with their expectations, but it hammered home to me how much we take cover art for granted.

No longer!