Cover Snark: How Many Hands?

Welcome! It’s time for Cover Snark! We hope it’s a good addition for your Monday morning.

The Stars in the Sky by Leslie McAdam. A shitless dude is pressing his hands up against a brick wall. He's wearing jeans that are unbuttoned, but the crotch shadows look suspiciously smooth.

Amanda: I feel like he might be a Ken doll down there.

Sarah: Dude, do you really have to pee that badly?

Elyse: He’s gonna make sweet sweet love to that wall.

CarrieS: He looks like two people glued together to make one very long person (torso-wise).

That Familiar Touch by Dara Joy. The cover looks like two very square and blocky computer animated figures. They are on a beach. The woman is wearing a red crop top and has a sheer veil over her face. The man is so tall that his face is cut off.

Amanda: My brain is having a difficult time processing all of this.

Every bit of it.

RHG: Um.

Elyse: What the actual fuck is happening?

Am I having a stroke?

Amanda: It’s like The Ring. You view the image and then…seven days…

Sarah: Dara Joy! Oh bless her covers, every one. I think we have joy snark in the archives.

Amanda: I just remember the mulleted dude wearing sunglasses in a lightning storm.

CarrieS: I don’t understand this. I can’t even be funny about it. That’s how much I don’t understand it.

Caught Up in Raine by LG O'Connor. A shirtless dude with flowing blonde hair is standing in front of a neon green background. It's raining, but the green background is making the rain look radioactive.

Amanda: Dude…you might want to get out of that rain.

Elyse: Also he’s completely dry.

CarrieS: True, those are my favorite colors, but I never knew till this moment how much I don’t want to look at all of them at once.

Good Cop Bad Cop. There's no author listed. Two shirtless men have police hats and helmets photoshopped onto them. A woman is positioned on her back in front of one of them, legs open, grabbing her own boobs, and her head thrown back in a scream. There's a hand between her legs, but it's coming out of her and grabbing a hand of one of the men. There are so many random hands.

From Becky: “It’s not even all the extra hands in the picture that make it so bizarre, although there are way too many hands. It’s the clumsily photoshopped helmets. From the cover, I’d expect the book to be Hogan’s Heroes erotic fan fiction.”

Amanda: There’s an extra hand coming out of her vagina. It’s holding the cop’s hands. Not sure if he’s the good cop or bad cop.

Sarah: Wait how many hands are in front of the guy who looks like he’s taking a wiz?

RHG: Three? I’m getting at least 8 hands.

Unless one of those belongs to the guy that’s got the vagina hand-tata on his dick, and he’s just got an abnormally long forearm?

Then I’m at 7.

Sarah: I’m counting six, but my vision is now blurry.

RHG: No wait, now I’m at a potential nine.

Sarah: Did you just do the abuterol?

Elyse: If you have a hand that comes out of your vagina, you should seek medical treatment immediately. Also why is she so much smaller than them?

CarrieS: She looks very unhappy. But I think she’s supposed to look super orgasmic? This is so disturbing.

Comments are Closed

  1. Empress of Blandings says:

    I bruised my eyelid yesterday, and when I saw the ‘Familiar Touch’ and ‘Good Cop’ covers, thought I’d done something to my eyes as well.

  2. Zyva says:

    I figured the “rain” in #3 is electronic. Like laser tag but nonviolent? Or TRON: Sexy

  3. Lostshadows says:

    The more I look at that second cover, the more convinced I am that if I squint in just the right way, I’ll see a coherent picture.

    Either that or the cover model is the poster child for why alcohol and tattoos don’t mix.

    The longer I look at the last cover, the more I expect it to haunt my nightmares.

  4. Laura says:

    “If you have a hand that comes out of your vagina, you should seek medical treatment immediately.” <— Well, or a midwife.

  5. The Other Kate says:

    I’m pretty sure the dude in the second cover is making the little circle-with-thumb-and-index-finger gesture. We got GOT, y’all!

  6. Ren Benton says:

    @Laura: If it’s a full-grown hand, a responsible midwife will send you straight to the hospital (or perhaps an exorcist) because there’s no way that’s coming out without a fractured pelvis or C-section.

  7. LG says:

    Oh man. I think I might own the first edition of That Familiar Touch, and it’s godawful hideous. I’m assuming that at some point it started as a photograph and then went through some extreme editing by someone (the author herself? there’s no cover “artist” listed) who was not very good at using the software. Yellow hair texture plastered all over the area where the model’s hair used to be (you can sort of see an edge of the original hairline, which was maybe dark brown).

    I wasn’t aware that it was possible to do a worse job than this cover, but I’m looking at the cover posted here and see that I’m very wrong.

  8. Ren Benton says:

    An artist can do astonishing things with Poser design software. Photorealism. Gorgeous illustrations.

    Everybody else makes that Dara Joy cover.

  9. hng23 says:

    One would think that a “New York Times and USA Today bestselling author” would be able to afford a Photoshop software upgrade. Free online tutorials can be found all over the internet.

  10. Todd says:

    Some people should have their Photoshop license revoked. Or else hire a 12-year-old to do their covers.

  11. Kathy says:

    I can’t even. That cop sh#t is plain old violence against women. (ymmv?) And that poor dude who is “Raine”, haven’t we seen him in about thirty versions of cover snark?

  12. SB Sarah says:

    @Kathy: Yup, for sure. But nothing says “romance” like a pensive expression and a chin divot.

  13. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    My first thought about the cop book was that it looked like straight-up mid-1970s porn where a woman is gang-raped and loves it. Ugh! Not trying to be judgy, but it’s hard to get snarky for something that seems to obviously express violence toward women. Please tell me that book is not marketed as a romance.

    Somewhat OT but…a friend of a friend (this is NOT an urban myth, I actually have met this person) had an “I didn’t know I was pregnant” pregnancy (I, who had to get maternity clothes within a week after missing my first period, wonder how this happens). Anyway, she had had a very bad night—stomach pains, back ache, etc.—and when she got up the next morning to go to the bathroom she saw a foot protruding from her vagina! She almost screamed her house down and then called 911.

  14. JJB says:

    @DiscoDollyDeb: Right there with you on the cop cover. Really too gross and disturbing for me to at all find the legion of spare hands remotely funny. Ugh.

    And thanks for that story–I’m sure it was kind of horrible for the woman at the time, but it made me laugh now and I sorely needed it!

  15. Lora says:

    I hope one of those hands has a switchblade in the last cover because that cover is alarming and looks very much as if the woman were being gang raped by police.

  16. LG says:

    I just realized that there’s no author name on that last cover. Cropped out, or is this an instance of even the author being too ashamed to put so much as a pen name on it?

  17. PamG says:

    Bad Cop, Good Cop looks like a Pratchett fan’s wildest fantasy: a threesome with Sarge and Nobby Nobbs. The magical run-off around Unseen University could explain the extra hands.

  18. sandra says:

    Are you sure Right Cop’s taking a whiz? That looks an awful lot like the head of his penis poking out of the purple cloud and he’s admiring himself. Or trying to figure out what to do with it? Neither one looks like they graduated top of their class at the police academy.

  19. EC Spurlock says:

    My first thought when I saw that last cover was POLICE BRUTALITY! Flashback to the 70’s…except unfortunately not. I feel so sorry for that woman. Evidently Bad Cop got first dibs.

    Too many hands in that cover and too many boobs in the Dara Joy. That looks like Salvador Dali needed fast cash so he made a brief foray into painting romance covers.

    And Mr Raine is clearly under cover because not only is he completely dry but his hair is blowing in the stormwind rather than being plastered to his head.

  20. denise says:

    I guess we know how Thing from the Addams family came to be…

    That cover is just disturbing on so many levels

  21. Briana says:

    You know the economy isn’t great when porn sites start selling screen shots as romance book covers…. (Cop book).

  22. Cristiane says:

    What I find odd about the horrific-looking cop book is that the woman looks as if she’s just holding two unimplanted implants on her chest, not holding actual attached breasts.

  23. Celia Marsh says:

    The Dara Joy looks like he’s got a knockoff Mona Lisa tattoo. Well, maybe more like a Eleanor of Aquitane tattoo, based on the clothing. Additionally, he has some seriously girlish lips, so I had some serious scroll down confusion, though i don’t think there’s any way that cover wouldn’t have confusion, whatever direction one might scroll with it.

  24. Kate says:

    My first thought upon seeing the Dara Joy cover was, “Why is that naked man carrying that woman in a Baby Björn?”

  25. Kathy says:

    Ha,ha, I just figured it out–Raine is also the guy on the cover of Amanda Ashley’s Sunlight. It had been driving me crazy where I had just seen him and it was in the last podcast!

  26. LMC says:

    Is that a woman’s head on the man’s body in the Dara Joy mishmash?

  27. Maite says:

    Dara Joy! I had missed her!

    Missed terrorizing my friends with her covers.

    And yet, the cop one is still the most disturbing.

  28. Louise says:

    For those who have successfully counted hands and are looking for a fresh challenge: how many [fragments of] different people are in the cover of That Familiar Touch? I count at least five, but then, my eyesight is not what it once was.

  29. Jodi says:

    They totally photoshopped a different backside onto the ‘The Stars in the Sky Cover,’ and that was the tame one!

  30. Zuzus says:

    Was I the only person enjoying a Dr Who moment with the Raine “Two hearts” tagline?

  31. Ali says:

    Thanks for the laughs, so good to let loose the chuckles. The first cover guy should continue to practise his smouldering look, he just looks unhappy to be there.

  32. Kris Bock says:

    That Familiar Touch looks like one of those hidden pictures, where if you just let your eyes unfocus the right way, everything will snap into place and make sense.

    Best possible read of the cops cover, that woman has been infected with a horrible alien genital monster, and the helpful cops are trying to lure it out of her body with their dicks.

  33. Britt says:

    I really want to know who approved these covers? After that , I want them fired.

  34. Mary says:

    I know I’m late, but I’m gonna enter the big NOPEFEST2018 surrounding the last cover. Nope. Nope NOPE. I say again NOPE very much NOPE I HAVE NEVER SEEN SO MUCH NOPE SO MUCH NOPE I CAN’T EVEN LOOK STRAIGHT AT ALL THE NOPE NOPE NOPE.

    NOPE.

    SO MUCH NOPE THE WORD NOPE IS STARTING TO LOOK WEIRD NOPE THANK YOU NOPE AGAIN PLEASE FOR THOSE IN THE BACK NOPE.

    NOPE.

    Now that that’s out of the way, perhaps I can make some more helpful/interesting/amusing/at least less nope-filled contributions.

    Cover 1: That is most definitely the look of a man who was about to pee against that wall and is annoyed that you interrupted him.

    Cover 2: I…ah…um…

    I haven’t been this visually confused since…actually I don’t think I’ve ever been this visually confused. I – what – I–

    https://i.pinimg.com/originals/00/01/d7/0001d7e5f19e1dd5fe31241911c91afa.gif

    I mean, at the age of three, my little sister’s MS Paint creations made more visual sense than that – whatever it was. That book should come with a warning label: “Prolonged exposure to this cover may cause nausea, vomiting, migraine, insomnia, hemorrhaging of the eyes, blindness, paranoia, and/or insanity. Stop staring at once if you begin to experience any of these symptoms. Consult your doctor before looking if you have epilepsy, chronic migraines, heart disease, or any sort of mental illness.”*

    Cover 3: CarrieS: True, those are my favorite colors, but I never knew till this moment how much I don’t want to look at all of them at once.

    Oh, same here! Also, if I never had to see that “trying so hard to look dramatic and serious” face on another person ever again, it would be too soon.

    I find the praise to be amusing as well: “Unique women’s fiction story packed with emotion, humor and sexiness…” I mean, if you really want it to sound like a “unique” story, you’re going to have to be a touch more specific than that. Just a touch.

    And now we come back to NOPEFEST2018! Hooray! One final thought before I nope myself away:

    https://78.media.tumblr.com/fb321b2c3ec463389ba71a79b235532c/tumblr_n0pgiuIbdv1sexrjko1_400.gif

    Thank you, Emmet.

    NOPE.

    *This joke was sincerely not meant in any offensive spirit and I apologize profusely and give other readers free rein to upbraid me thoroughly and the editors permission (if possible) to remove the joke and/or the comment altogether if it was offensive. I was mocking the cover and the long lists of possible dangerous symptoms on various prescription drugs, not anyone with medical conditions of any sort. Once again, sincere apologies if it was offensive nevertheless.

Comments are closed.

By posting a comment, you consent to have your personally identifiable information collected and used in accordance with our privacy policy.

↑ Back to Top