Welcome back, my fellow creatives!

Remember the days of pulp covers?

Some were sordid, some were cheesy, some were bombastic, some were bloody, and some were aaaaaaaaaaaaall of that and more. I look at the book covers today, wondering which are AI and which aren’t, and I miss those days, you know?

Then I stumbled across Paperbacks from Hell, a collection of 70s and 80s horror fiction covers with commentary by Grady Hendrix.

This book is a glorious journey through all the macabre and mayhem of the pulps. Sure, mysteries and science fiction also have their lovely pulp periods, but it’s October, dammit, so we’ll focus on these beauties from Hendrix’s compilation. Plus, we as writers can learn a lot about cover design by studying the shock factor that hooked readers back then.

Take a classic like The Haunting of Hill House. Since Shirley Jackson was already a name, it makes sense that her name is big’n’bold at the top. The yellow text pops against the dark blues and blacks. The lone woman in a nightdress looks like prey with that massive skull in the background. It’s melodramatic, sure, but effective.

You may want to go with simple and bold with color, which can work, too. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby is a great example of this. Here the title dominates everything against that blood red color. Plus, there’s a gothic, dark house in the lower corner, almost like a monster creeping into view. Technically, this cover doesn’t tell us much aside from the movie being popular. But you can’t deny that this cover would stand out on any bookshelf with that loud bloodred background to the huge white title.

Cover painting seems to be a lost art these days. Hendrix highlights a few painters like Rowena Morrill, who certainly had imagination for books like Jane Parkhurst’s Isobel. There’s a lurid pallor over this with the devil’s tongue and the nude woman with her rear barely covered. But Morrill knew what folks were looking for, which wasn’t the author’s name so much as the sensationalism.

Another painter I have to highlight here is H. Tom Hall. Hendrix notes he was known for historical romance covers. So what’s he doing in Paperbacks from Hell? Hall created a cover for Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and it is GORGEOUS. The voluptuous woman with bare shoulders and upper chest, hair cascading and eyes half-shut, lies in the arms of a classically dressed pale stud-muffin of a vampire. The background of fog and carriage outlined by a burning, smoky sky is a beautiful touch to this cover. I don’t even care about the blurb eating up space at the bottom. The title only covers a part of the woman’s dress, so Hall’s painting is on full display here.

Sometimes pulp covers got goofy, and maybe that’s the way your own story could be marketed. How often do we see toys on a rampage? Maybe it’s an evil marionette, a gang of terrifying dolls, or an axe-wielding headless teddy bear. Skeletons, too, got used in all sorts of wackadoodle situations, like as a nurse in a hospital, a fortune teller, or even a cheerleader like Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door.

What about a creature? We’ve all seen the book cover for a classic like Jaws. Bugs can look innocent enough, but when you look at Gregory Douglas’ The Nest, there’s an unnatural glow around that bug in the night. Pairing the natural with the unnatural forces one’s eyes to linger. It can be melodramatic, such as a crab holding a dagger over a lady on a sacrificial alter. There is also the surprise, such as bugs swimming through a blood-red cover, and that mound of straw you think is in the middle of the cover is actually the top of someone’s drowned head. But my favorite is the over-the-top Blood Worm by John Alkin. The worm is clearly of another world, its disjointed jaws of pointed teeth dripping in blood. Big Ben crumbles in its stranglehold. Blood pools in the Thames around the worm’s body. Match that with the gothic font, and you’ve got a killer cover, period.

There’s something about a cover that stares back at you, too. In Grady Hendrix’s collection, evil characters often stare at the readers, daring them to read. Russ Martin’s The Education of Jennifer Parrish is a terrific example of this, or T.M. Wright’s Nursery Tale, or the classic Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. But Ehren M. Ehly’s Evil Eye is surely one of the more intense examples I saw in this collection. Perhaps it’s the blood-tipped jaws of the caped skeleton. Perhaps it’s the high-fantasy-style title font. Or maybe it’s because one eye, golden and lit, hexes you from another realm.

Whether you’re an indie author or a traditional author, it’s so very important to have ideas and input on your story’s cover. It’s the first impression your story makes on the world, after all! We don’t want covers that underwhelm, nor do we want covers that deceive. Hendrix’s annotations to the covers he shares are delicious to read, as he’s not afraid to poke at the covers that don’t exactly correlate with their stories. Bernard Taylor’s The Reaping is an example of this. As Hendrix writes:

The floating unborn became a recurring image on horror novel covers, even for books like…The Reaping, which didn’t feature a single evil fetus.

I hoped you enjoyed this perusal of covers from hell! Perhaps you see potential in one of these cover design strategies for your own series. I’m not planning on any evil fetuses or knife-wielding crabs (for now), but I’ve certainly got some ideas for colors, fonts, and dramatic eyes!

Coming up, we’ve got another podcast, an interview, lots of gratitude, and cosmic creature creation.

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!