It’s Monday! You deserve some Cover Snark!
From Carole: Not sure if someone else caught this one – just sooo bad.
Sarah: Also the gentleman delivering gifts needs to (a) CLOTHE the NEWBORNS and (b) possibly put on his own pants.
Tara: What was he holding in the original photo?
Kiki: if a man gives me twins as a Christmas gift I’m going to be GREATLY displeased.
Catherine: He’s going to drop that baby right on its head, but that might not matter if it already has hypothermia. I don’t think he should be put in charge of babies, either way.
Amanda: I feel like we had another “delivering his gifts” with a Dr. Nips on a couch.
Sneezy: My dude, flexing your boobs won’t actually help you with baby holding.
From Kerri: I found this cover and I needed to share it. There’s just so much. The pit sniff check, the fact that the dude appears to have been chopped off at the hips. Whatever is going on with his bicep, because that’s not a shape found in nature. The amount of static electricity in the flying tiger’s fur.
Sarah: I get the pit sniffing dudes confused. There are so many.
Tara: I’m imagining the tiger running, shouting “Goddammit Chad, stop staring at your bicep again. I’m supposed to be taking you somewhere!”
Amanda: Where is the tiger taking you, Chad? Out to a nice seafood dinner?
Sneezy: Forget Chad, Tiger!!! You were always meant to be with ME!!!!
Seriously, I think my brain is breaking. I see a pouncing tiger, and all I want to focus on is its FLOOF, and how much I want to SNUGGLE IT, and all the PETS I’ll give- is this how I’ll die?
From Amanda: The muscles looks like he has a hernia in the wrong spot.
Sarah: This is not my preferred Rorschach test, thanks.
Tara: Is Anubis the name of the bulge?
Sarah: …which one?
There are so many.
Tara: This one! Please note, I used the star to keep with the patriotic imagery theme.
Amanda: It all looks like bread dough to me.
Sneezy: …so…Aliens but Egyptian myth style?
And why would Anubis, well, CARE about white America?
Or accept a salaried position?
Catherine: Ok, this cover is creeping me out because I’m waiting for the bugs to burst out of his skin. Presumably the bugs are scarabs, in keeping with the Egyptian theme…
From Jen. Thanks, Jen!
Sarah: This guy thinks the sun rises and sets on him, no question. Also he probably has a sunburn.
Elyse: Is the sun shining out of his ear?
Lara: Also, is it just me or does he look seriously dehydrated?
Carrie: It’s not just you.
The fact that it’s called “The Rancher’s Pregnant Ex” but only this dude is on the cover makes me wonder. Is HE the pregnant ex? That is a thing that can happen…but if so, I really hope he starts drinking more fluids!
Claudia: Agreed, he’s starting to look desiccated. Sunscreen would not go amiss either.
Sneezy: Seconding what everyone is saying about fluids and sunscreen. Jesus fuck, the bullet nipples also don’t help.
Catherine: I realise that by Rancher Novel Cover rules, he is staring dehydratedly off into the distance thinking about his ex. But something about the placement of the cow on the cover is making me think that we are actually going by Shapeshifter Novel Rules, in which case, there is definitely a bovine shapeshifter in this story. Which is a twist on the rancher romance that I now kind of want to read…
The twins look like they’re wearing photoshopped underwear, the upper twins pair look ok if they were padded out a bit so it looked like they’d actually do the job intended. But the lower twin, it looks like red lacy underwear! So many wrongs…
Anubis guy looks like he’s about to recreate that famous scene from alien…
And the lower hand on that lower baby. Or is it a hand.
And that rancher’s hat is very ill-fitting
Cover designers: try to avoid placing words in the vicinity of your cover model’s ass. This is doubly important when said word begins with the same three letters as “anus.”
I think it looks like wrapping paper on the twins. Either way, those are some badly wrapped little bums.
Please note, I used the star to keep with the patriotic imagery theme.
Slain.
Re: photoshopped baby underwear – so really that’s two unclothed baby butts. Danger danger.
Last cover: it’s not a bovine shifter story but luckily I know that Zoe Chant just published a novella featuring one…
The link (thanks Amanda!) to a previous Dr Nipple cover led to a link to an old Fabio cover that led to two 2012 reviews of time travel romances by RedHeaded Girl. If you’ve got half an hour to kill and want to prolong your moment of fun Cover Snark snarkiness, I recommend 🙂
“Taken by the Tiger.” Because “The pit check that roared” is too long a title.
Taken by the Tiger is a typo. Should be Taken by the Texture, where in mysterious space fungus invades earth causing wildlife aka Tigger and peoples aka Duck Down to develop weird rippling textures in their fur/hair and skin (see shoulder bumps) I mean–who knows what’s gonna burst outta there.
Does anybody else think the first book cover model has T-rex arms? The proportion of his forearms is way off in comparison to the top.
Cover 1: My first thought was “Dead babies… gross.”
Cover 2: Dude appears to have used an entire container of styling product on his hair. Fluffy tiger can do better.
Cover 3: Anubis seems like an odd choice for some sort of rah-rah all-american white paramilitary group.
Cover 4: his hunched pose looks uncomfortable. Also, a shape-shifter bovine rancher romance would have serious consent issues, since a rancher owns his cattle as property, so good thing his ex isn’t the cow.
I found a face on Anubis’ back and now I can’t unsee it. On the left side of the back, facing left (left profile) he has a big nose and a very long chin. The eye is the dent up by the shoulder. See it?
So I followed @Arijo down the link rabbit hole and in the fullness of time ended up at an October 2012 post by SB Sarah titled “The Following Cliches Are Brought to You by the Letter’P’.” (Pardon my Punktuation.) After rereading this excellent post and comment thread, it occurred to me that I haven’t seen a consideration of romance cliche in eons. So, Imma just thinking, “Please, ma’am, may we have some more?”
Delivering his Gifts: What an odd place to cut off the top of the picture. You can’t see the panicked look in his eyes as he gets set to cry “Wait! Come back! You can’t just balance two newborns on my arms and then leave me precariously immobile, naked in the falling snow!”
Taken by the Tiger: If the photo had been snapped two seconds sooner, we would have seen him gently easing his new head into position, testing whether it fits on his shoulders. Or perhaps two seconds later as he lifts it off, deciding Naah. This one isn’t me. Incidentally, what is the tiger doing in a conifer forest? Is it wearing a supplementary fur coat because it’s cold outside? And if so, why doesn’t our head-tester feel the cold too?
Anubis: What, exactly, does “a jackal-headed deity [thanks, History Museum of Canada] who presided over the embalming process and accompanied dead kings in the afterworld” have to do with the Stars and Stripes? Can’t help thinking it would be more fun if the picture cut off a few inches sooner, letting us speculate about the model’s head.
Rancher’s Pregnant Ex: Woo hoo, it’s the ever-popular Four Completely Mismatched Fonts … but we’ll have to deduct a few points because none of them results in an array of misreadings that are more interesting than the actual title. More to the point, who is the author? Is it Leslie North, giving us a Mary Sue heroine, and if so, will other books in the series offer Mary Sue Smith, Mary Sue Robinson, Mary Sue Green and so on? Or is Mary Sue the infelicitously named author, while Leslie North is an editor hogging more cover space than is really seemly?
@Louise: the tiger appears to be a Siberian Tiger, which would account for the trees and some of the fluffiness.
@Kit I was not previously aware of Zoe Chant. Thanks for sharing that info. I have just one=clicked a book and expect there will be more. Not the cow shifter yet but I see that in my future. For some reason, I have really gotten into shifters in the last several months.
If Anubis was science fiction, it wouldn’t be scarabs bursting through. It would be a body usurping wormlike alien called a Goa’uld, right?
@Vicki: There’s TAKING THE BULL BY THE HORNS:
https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Bull-Horns-Zoe-Chant-ebook/dp/B097LTKV25/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=zoe+chant+kindle+books&qid=1628535987&sprefix=zoe+chant&sr=8-6
Of course, anything with a bull shifter gives me serious Greek myth vibes. Zeus & Europa, anyone? Or Poseidon & Pasiphae?
The Kate Daniels books have bison shifters as part of Clan Heavy. There’s a plot line and secondary romance involving one.
Those babies are gonna wake up. Hungry. Tiny-armed baby-holding guy has no pants. So he has nowhere to keep bottles, especially in the middle of a snowstorm outside.
We’ll leave the future state of tiny-armed baby-holding guy’s eardrums (and the nips) to the sick imaginations of this crew.
Not a cow, but Lisa Oliver has a book featuring a Buffalo shifter. It’s the fourth book in the Arrowtown series.
Cover 2, Taken by the Tiger, has skin tone problems. But the Steve Austin action figure doll wrist where you roll back the skin to see the Bionic Man parts is weird. His head is pale, and so is that hand in his hair, but that weird roll on the wrist of that hand looks just like the doll’s arm. It’s even the right arm. My brothers had Bionic Man and I had the Bionic Woman dolls.
If you weren’t a kid in the 70s, you have no idea what I’m talking about.
@Jaws – thank you for this unforgettable image, I will treasure it always.
Meanwhile, my brain filtered out the photoshop and visualized “cover model holding two actually naked babies, pee and/or poop threat level Orange” – I hope the babies were not actually held by him but photoshopped in, which would explain the weird arms. The shadows on said arms are quite realistic though. Maybe they are someone else’s arms? Someone who knows what to do with babies? Starting with not taking them out in the snow?