Book Cover Smackdown! ‘Vacation’ vs. ‘The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22′ vs. ‘Demon’s Door’
By John DeNardo |
Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at
12:20 am
Gather ’round, armchair art critics! It’s time once more for another Book Cover Smackdown!
Here are today’s scary contenders…
Your Mission (should you choose to accept it): Tell us which cover you like best (the easy part) and why (the harder part).
Books shown here:
- Vacation by Matthew J. Costello (Thomas Dunne Books)
- The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22 edited by Stephen Jones (Running Press)
- Demon’s Door (Jim Rook Series) by Graham Masterton (Severn House Publishers)
NOTE: Bigger, better cover art images are available by clicking the images or title links.
Related posts:
- Book Cover Smackdown! ‘Champion of Mars’ vs. ‘The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21′ vs. ‘The Immorality Engine’
- Book Cover Smackdown! ‘Muse and Reverie’ vs. ‘Wings of Wrath’ vs. ‘Lesser Demons’
- TOC: ‘The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #21′ and ‘The Mammoth Book of The Best of Best New Horror: Two Decades of Dark Fiction’ edited by Stephen Jones
- Book Cover Smackdown! ‘The Undertakers’ vs. ‘Fangboy’ vs. ‘Beyond the Door’
- TOC: ‘The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Volume #22′ Edited by Stephen Jones
Tagged with: Book Cover Smackdown
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As a graphic designer and horror fanatic, it’ an easy one for me.
The Mammoth Book is by far the most memorable, because it’s both visually striking, and basically grabs you into looking at it.
While Vacation cover is great design, I’ve seen that approach for various novels in several genres before, so it looses impact.
Alas, the Demon’s Door cover design isn’t very memorable to me… I’d look past it on the shelves. It’s just a bit generic.
My 2 cents.
Vacation – it’s simple, a bit disgusting, and tells me that there will be blood. The other two just seem too cliche.
I think all this covers are pretty good. Appealing images, nice composition and colors. But vacation gets my vote, is a more subtle, appealing illustration. The others have a more “in you face” kind of picture, this one tell us lot of things without showing us much.
I think Vacation is easily the best, but none of these are in my wheelhouse.
Anthologies are tricky because you have so much more information to pack on the cover. Mamoth Book does an excellent job of pulling you in with a striking image, and then giving the details in a readable way.
The minimalist design of Vacation is well-done, but not very novel. The image and lower-case serif typography is something of a standard, and there’s little to mark whether I’m getting mystery, murder-thriller, or epidemic-thriller, and I’m puzzled on the relationship between the drain and the title.
Demon’s Door isn’t a bad cover, but it’s not a great cover either.
I gotta go with Vacation. It just had the most immediate visual impact.
I’d pick Vacation. I’ve seen similar designs in other genre’s, but its a fresh approach for horror and so it jumps out more I think.
The Mammoth Book looks like an 80′s horror movie poster. And not one of the memorable ones either, one of the “that’s so 80′s” ones.
Demon’s Door is fine. It does its job, but I’d forgotten what it looked like by the time I finished writing about the other two.
I’m tempted to say “Mammoth Book…” just because it’s got Stephen Jones name on it, and the cover design is very strong, if a little dated, but “Vacation” is a very powerful and intriguing image, and would definitely make me pick up the book for a closer look, so I’ll have to give it top spot.
“Demon’s Door” doesn’t do a darned thing for me, sorry to say.