I think the cover of the trade paperback version of The Devil in a Forest is stunning, and I would buy the print and hang it on my wall, if it were available. (btw, internet pictures of the cover(like at Amazon) don't do it justice.)
Dragonfly
17 quoted lines
From: jclute at cix.compulink.co.uk (John Clute)
Reply-To: whorl at lists.best.com
To: whorl at lists.best.com
Subject: Re: (whorl) BEATING AN EIGHT-LEGGED HORSE
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 11:59 +0100 (BST)
In-Reply-To: <200009021918.MAA02421 at lists1.best.com>
A couple comments:
1) I thought the New Sun covers were abominable. But this made no difference.
2) I thought the design of the Short Sun covers was philistine, and destroyed any virtues the covers might possess.
3) I think Jim Burns usually does very well with books he illustrates, and that these covers--if the art can be abstracted from the design of the whole--are meritorious but failed attempts at doing illuminations of a text of quite extraordinary visual difficulty. None of us on this list seems really to know what any of the main characters in the book look light at any one moment. Fixing this sort of thing into a visual representation is something Jim was not able to do. He was probably the wrong kind of artist for the job, though he is unusual in the fact he actually reads the ms he's illustrating, with great care. But find the right artist. The world of Short Sun is immensely less fixable than the world of its predecessors, all of which have execrable art. Is there any
good Gene Wolfe visual?
Best,
John C
*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.