GETTING CLOSER: A cover and a soundtrack for THE BALLAD OF PERILOUS GRAVES

I’ll be starting a newsletter soon, but I figured I’d better say a thing or two about this here because it’s just so BIG. This week, Red Hook unveiled the cover for my novel, THE BALLAD OF PERILOUS GRAVES, due out June of 2022.

They showed me a mockup of the cover some months ago, and when I first laid eyes on it, my skull heated up, and this weird dazzling tingle spread through me from my center. This isn’t hyperbole or an exaggeration—looking at that cover for the first time gave a completely new physical sensation that has been with me to a greater or lesser degree ever since. It feels CRAZY.

That sensation is a distillation of a dreamy incredulous feeling that’s begun to suffuse my everyday life. It’s never far from my thoughts or from brushing the surface of my skin. This is a time of many firsts for me, and each one feels explosive. These are milestones I never thought about specifically as I dreamed of success in my writing career, but each of them is recognizable, carrying with it a sense of deja vu that makes my life very strange right about now.

The cover hasn’t changed much from that first mockup my editor, Nivia Evans sent to me. Lisa Marie Pompilio of Von Brooklyn Design created the cover as she has so many others. Like each of those, this image communicates the creativity, whimsy, creativity, and darkness that I tried to bring to this story. The idea behind the image seems simple: A headstone that’s also a piano played by skeletal hands, but like this book, it is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Almost every aspect of this process has been joyful, fulfilling, and unexpected in so many ways. I can’t wait to share the final product with you all. Oh, and as a little treat, I’ve created a Spotify playlist of music that inspired The Ballad. Here it is!