Brown Bagging Bad Book Covers

I’m ready and willing to defend the literary merits of science fiction and fantasy.  So why do I nervously scan the faces on the bus as I look for a seat, clutching a brown paper bag to my chest like a wino?  What is it I’m hiding?

Fantasy and SF have always had some of the most gorgeous cover illustrations, and (rather more often) the absolute worst.  And I’m not just talking about the fanboy, Franzetta-style fantasies on pulpy Conan books (I actually love Frank’s style, save for its salaciousness–I had a poster of one of his paintings on my wall growing up).

Now I’m reading what may be the fantasy series with the greatest gap in quality between the story and the art.  Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars series is quite good, but the cover art is most generously described as gaudy.  It’s bad enough that I first had these books sitting on my shelf three years ago, but could never get past the covers to read them.  I’m glad I finally took that plunge, but I wish I didn’t have to brown bag it in public.  In contrast the covers on her Crossroads trilogy are striking for the right reasons.

Lois McMaster Bujold is another author who’s suffered from bad covers, especially in her Vorkosigan saga.  But the cover to The Curse of Chalion, while conventional, is part of what attracted me to the book.  Good thing, since it’s one of the five best fantasies written in the past decade.  Speaking of fantasy, is there a rule that erotic fantasy has to have horrible covers?  I shudder at the ads in every issue of Realms of Fantasy.  And why is it that some of these people who self-publish don’t realize their book would be more respectable if they left the cover blank instead of letting their little brother photoshop it?

Perhaps the most disturbing book cover I’ve seen came attached to an equally disturbing book: Orson Scott Card’s Wyrms, with its classic pulp heroine quivering before a towering, amorphous, multi-phallused beetle.  Hart’s Hope is much more to my liking.  With it’s more sedate styling it provokes a different sort of nostalgia.

Snarking on bad book covers is tons of fun, and I recently spent a lunchhour trying to muffle my guffaws as I scrolled through the archives at Judge a Book by its Cover.  Granted, some of this stuff is so easy it’s like picking on a kid in a wheelchair, but in this case the cruelty is funny.  And deserved.

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