Cover Snark: Too Smooth

Hey! It’s Monday and we think it’s the perfect time for Cover Snark.

From Jen: This motorcycle seems to be running over the guy, or maybe it’s a ghost cycle?

Amanda: Run him over! He knows what he did!

Also, his abs could technically be speed bumps.

Sarah: This is some fine vintage Poser art. and I’m reasonably sure from the cover copy that the hero is a motorcycle shifter.

Elyse: Is that the Black Widow?

Claudia: No matter what, roadkill is never appealing.

EllenM: LOLLL I love this cover it reminds me of early 2000s pPaystation games.

Catherine: Is this actually a romance? Because between the title and the cover, I feel like it could be a vigilante biker girl superhero story, and that would be fine with me.

Julia's Baby by Natasha Murray. A small, sleeping baby is crawling across mossy tree roots to a weird red puddle. A bizarre symbol is carved onto the tree trunk.

Sneezy: Um.

Shana: This. Is. Terrifying.

Amanda: Is that supposed to be blood in the bottom right? There’s just something so unsettling about this cover.

Sarah: No.

No to all of it.

No.

Catherine: Baby left alone in the woods. Asleep. With a creepy symbol made from spiderwebs floating above it. Are they trying to get this child stolen by the fairies? Because this is definitely how you get your child stolen by the fairies.

Alternatively, that bit in the corner is blood, the baby is possessed by the creepy spiderweb symbol thing, and has just fallen asleep after eating the body of its victim. Possessed, flesh-eating babies are definitely what I am looking for in a romance…

Aspen by T.K. Lucaith. Two very white, nude, and hairless people are kissing atop a lake. Like physically standing on water, with mountains in the background.

Catherine: Have they… fused together?

And does she have a beard?

I have many questions about this cover, truly.

I do like the warning about graphic steamy sex scenes, though. I like to be warned about those. So that I can one-click.

Sneezy: Yes, but do you trust a sex scene from… glances at fused creature

*whips around*

From that?

*risks glance back*

Although they seem to be standing on freezing water. If one of them has some kind of fire power, prognosis is good there may be temperature play

Shana: Are they floating? What is going on here?

AJ: I just feel like this cover is protesting too much. “They’re graphic and steamy! Really! One person touches another person’s” (looks at smeared writing on hand) “squiggling manbun”

EllenM: Of course everyone can groom themselves how they like but these two look like they have nary a hair follicle between them like are they robots.

Amanda: Two smooth featureless Barbie and Ken dolls.

Sarah: The placement of the S and P in “Aspen” is absolutely masterful.

Forgotten Flower by Rebecca Blanc. A shirtless man with a paw print tattoo on his pec is holding the noodly, naked body of a woman. The whole thing is in a shade of icy blue.

From Jen: Her leg seems unnaturally long?

Tara: Did they airbrush a nipple out of there? I wasn’t sure what I was looking at for a bit.

Elyse: Eve wants her tattoo back.

Amanda: Elyse, that’s a deep cut and I appreciate it.

Shana: Honestly, it looks like he’s holding a bunch of body parts,

Comments are Closed

  1. Luce says:

    Yet another selection of wonderfully weird covers, I love it!
    The barbie dolls are scary. That biker gang from the first cover should consider a detour through Aspen.

    That last cover, the one with the dripping, crying nipple has me confused about the third hand grabbing her boob. Is it her, suddenly feeling modest? Is it an extra hand he has? What else does he have extra of?

  2. JaniceG says:

    Regarding “Driven to the Limit,” the figure on the motorcycle was androgynous enough on first glance that I thought at first it was a male and that the large headlight was placed in a very interesting location

  3. LisaM says:

    Julia has a seriously creepy baby. I think that head started off on someone else’s body.

  4. HeatherT says:

    That baby’s head and arms are all wrong, but honestly, I think the arms are creepier.

  5. Qualisign says:

    The most distressing thing about ASPEN is that the woman has to balance the title with her toe and check for voyeurs while trying to look excited about an uncomfortable kiss. Multitasking at its worst.

  6. FashionablyEvil says:

    With that picture, I’m just reading Aspen to mean “ass, penis.” Seems appropriate.

  7. Mrs. Obed Marsh says:

    “Julia’s Baby” is folk horror, you can’t tell me different

  8. Kate says:

    Is that Aspen cover a deliberate callback to the 70’s novel by Burt Hirschfeld? I remember my mom picking it up at an airport and my 7 year old self was puzzled by the woman apparently running around outside in just her underwear. https://www.fantasticfiction.com/h/burt-hirschfeld/aspen.htm

  9. Yota Armai says:

    Julia’s Baby is unsettling. The blurb in my head goes like this:

    Julia at first thought the meadows and forests looked peaceful and inviting, but she will learn that there are things hiding in the dark places, among the roots and in the gnolls. She will learn that a child born of these woods is not as helpless as it seems. Survival doesn’t care about your feelings.

    I think I’ll be seeing those weirdly thin arms in my nightmares.

  10. Barb says:

    Is the tree overlooking the baby wearing a hockey mask? We need to get that baby out of there.

  11. Jazzlet says:

    The surprisingly happy soon-to-be-dead body on the Driven to the Limit cover is obviously being run over because of his excessive hair gel use.

  12. MirandaB says:

    On Forgotten Flower, we seem to have an extra hand at the right.

  13. TinaNoir says:

    That Forgotten Flower cover is really disturbing.

    First it looks like he has just dismembered a body.

    Second, is that the entire leg or just the hip to knee? If so it is freakishly long and doesn’t look naturally occurring.

    Third, whose hand is that? It does not look like it belongs to the dismembered body. A third person who helped with the dismembering?

    And finally is the dismembered body a flat-chested, nipple-less woman? Or a slight nipple-less male?

    There is just so much WRONG there.

  14. KB says:

    My brain read ASPEN as “ASPLEEN” and the WTF moment I had was really something.

  15. Sue says:

    At first glance the Forgotten Flower cover made me think the dude was doing some sort of weird yoga. Like those body parts were his and he was just doing extraordinarily strange things with them. Second glance showing me that those were someone else’s body parts didn’t really make me feel much better.

  16. Batgirl says:

    The baby cover made me so curious (ooh! folk horror!) I went to check it out on Amazon.ca, where it has ALAS! a completely different genericover of a dark-haired guy and cityscape.
    If you share my curiosity, here is the blurb, which makes no mention of a baby at all – but it could actually be folk horror:

    After only a month of being together, Julia Bridgewater and her hot boyfriend Seth Hearn are on the run. Fearing for their lives, they escape from Sussex and flee to Ireland with the hope of starting a new life together.

    To survive, Jules and Seth must earn a living without being discovered. The streets of Cork offer Jules and Seth a financial solution to all their money worries. Hidden talents are revealed, making their bond stronger. Seth never fails to surprise Jules.

    Seth, having worked at Waterfall West Riding School, hopes that the owner May will give them work. Will Moss his black cob remember him? When they visit May’s run down Manor House, Seth has the distinct feeling that something is horribly wrong.

    Things are looking up, until unwelcome visitors come to Waterfall West and cause major headaches for them both. Their lives spiral out of control with disastrous consequences.

  17. JenM says:

    I also was curious enough to check out the description for Julia’s Baby. After reading it, I’m utterly baffled at why a baby was even on that cover. There is no mention of ANY babies in the blurb. The current Amazon cover is much more “normal” although GR still shows the baby cover in all its glory. The author must have gotten tired of the question “Why is there a baby on that cover when there’s no baby in the story?”.

  18. Jean says:

    That first one has me singing ‘Dead hunk in the middle of the road’

  19. Merle says:

    Driven to the Limit: The parts of that motorcycle look oddly vegetative– is this some sort of sci fi/fantasy where motorcycles are grown? She appears to be driving through the guy.

    The people on “Aspen” are weirdly plastic in a way that seems sort of 70s Science Fiction, or terrible computer animation. I can’t imagine them managing anything “steamy”.

    The body he’s holding on “Forgotten Flower” appears to be made out of bread dough from the way his fingers are sinking into it. Also looks male to me, but that’s a guess. No idea about the random extra hand.

  20. Scifigirl1986 says:

    Why do the characters on Driven to the Limit and Aspen look like Sims avatars? That’s actually bugging me more than the extra hand on the last book cover.

    Also, the baby cover book had me wondering if Julia had PPD and the author was a fan of PPD Robin sticking baby Emma in a tree on General Hospital.

  21. EC Spurlock says:

    None of these covers are romance books. The first is a murder mystery with a biker detective. The second is folk horror (and are we sure that malnourished baby is Julia’s and not Rosemary’s?) The third is sci-fi. And the fourth is a faux-Pygmalion story in which this guy has formed his perfect female out of Silly Putty and she is now melting and stretching from the heat.

    @ Scifigirl1986 I too thought they were Sims!

  22. Jaws says:

    Generally, I like the idea of “It’s Monday So It Must Be Cover Snark.” That actually sounds like an interesting book.

    I thought Ghost Rider had a ghostly rider and a real motorcycle, but that first cover is the other way around.

    The scary part about that second cover is the thingy above the baby, which looks way too much like a faux-metal cutout holiday ornament from Hellmark for comfort. Somebody needs to clean up after that spilled bottle of juice, and has helpfully started with a filthy mop head. Sort of.

    That third one is quite possibly the worst ad for an overpriced ski resort I’ve ever seen. It’s accurate, though; the service in Aspen and Telluride tends to be… wooden.

    There’s just something fundamentally wrong about a cover for a werewolf romance with nary a follicle in sight. Given werewolves’ ability to regenerate, you’d think not even a wax job moments before the cover shoot would work.

  23. LisaM says:

    Rorschach test, now the red blob under Julia’s abandoned baby looks like a demon moose.

  24. denise says:

    Those are some crazy covers.

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