Books I Read for the Cover

Also known as: How I Discovered Christina Mrozik

As I frequently reiterate, I love the weird! The creepy! The ghoulish! But also the deeply environmental, which fortunately go hand-in-hand a lot of the time. Horror—my favorite horror, especially—has a concern with the body in the context of the world around it, the ways in which the world influences what we think of as our distinct form and shows us that it is not, in fact, separate from the world around it. 

When I choose books, though, I will confess to judging a book by it’s cover. In fact, not only do I pick books for covers I like, I’m guilty of being slow to read or refusing to read books with covers that I don’t love. (I’ve been recommended Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield over and over again, but it wasn’t until I saw the UK cover that I finally admitted I should read it. Its right up my alley!) I usually don’t do this consciously, but when I get recommended the same titles over and over again and don’t read them, I have to confront my own mental block. While I’m endeavoring to work beyond this issue of mine, this article is the exact opposite of that. 

US Version

UK Version

This is an ode to all of the incredible covers that led me to great books. 

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

When I picked this book up, I had been staring at it in the store for weeks. It’s just so beautiful! I love the colors, the font, all of it. I had to have it, and I’m glad I did because I will die on this hill—The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is one of the best books that I read in 2022. The tone is funny and dark at the same time as you follow the recently-ghostified war photographer Maali on a quest to help his loved ones solve his murder, but he is confined by the rules of ghost physics. He can go places where he’s been before, he can follow whispers (or shouts) of his own name on the wind, and he can follow his body (in pieces) to where it ends up. Set within Sri Lanka in 1990, this is equal parts romance, ghost story, mystery, historical fiction, and romance. It checks every box! 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

This is an aesthetic shift from the last one. This green, minimalist cover conjures all things Irish Christmas, and it looked like a much cozier read than it wound up being (though the narrative was all the better for that!) In 1985, magdalen laundries have been outlawed but are still very much alive and controlled by the church. Bill Furlong, a man interested in living his life as quietly and peacefully as possible, delivers coal to the convent morning and is confronted with the complicit silence of his own town controlled by the church. This empathetic microcosm of a story is worth ten times the time it takes to read. 

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi 

The color palette of this is gorgeous and mirrors the one of Seven Moons (at least in my mind). The design is dynamic; your eye is drawn across the page, and then you return to discern what the actual imagery is. I had no idea what this book was about when I got it, but I devoured it. An interwoven, intergenerational story of family, development, and tradition, Celestial Bodies (primarily) follows three sisters in Oman with radically different life trajectories and discovers the way all of their fates are tied into history. Oman’s history is complex, moving quickly from being a slave-owning society to a complicated modernity. The story of each sister diverges around how and why she marries (or doesn’t), but deeply questions values, connection, and who they will become. 

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin

This was a double whammy for me; I love Ursula K. LeGuin and can be compelled to pick up anything she’s written, but this book was also re-released with a new cover that’s just adorable. I didn’t realize how much I loved all these vibrant colors until I started writing this list. In a world disturbed by slow, mundane environmental disaster and violence, George discovers that his dreams have the power to shape reality (what he calls “effective” dreams). He is court-ordered to see a therapist after over-dosing in an attempt to stop the effective dreams, which change the world in unpredictable and often dangerous ways, but the therapist, Dr. Haber, sees fit to use George’s dreams to shape his own “ideal world.” This novel is surprisingly fun and grows in intensity as it goes on. 

Now we get to the inspiration for this post. I discovered the artist Christina Mrozik from the cover art of T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead and was delighted to find that they have quite the expanse of beautiful, creepy artwork that explores the way that bodies blend with the world in which they live. 

Better yet? They’ve done several custom book covers. Reader, I screamed! 

First off then, is What Moves the Dead, a highly sung favorite of mine. 

T. Kingfisher knocks it out of the park with this queer retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Alex Easton, retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying. As they journey to the estate, they are met with a strange British mycologist and a confused cowboy of an American doctor. All is unwell within the Usher household: the wildlife moves in unsettling ways well after what should be mortal wounds and Madeline paces the halls of the house in her sleep. 

Then I found Ruthie Fear by Maxim Luskotoff. 

The red, the purples, the bones, wings, ah! All of it coming together in harmony only on the hardcover edition of this book. Ruthie Fear is freaking weird and I loved it. This novel meandered like a stream down a mountain. It begins with a young Ruthie encountering an impossible, terrifying, headless creature in the woods and on and off spending the next twenty years of her life trying to see it again as she navigates her life in a tiny town in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Class tensions threaten to break apart the community she’s spent her whole life in, and ongoing development brings both promise and disaster. 

Finally, the forthcoming short story collection by Corinna Chong, The Whole Animal. 

This is Corinna Chong’s debut collection of short stories in which she grapples with what it means to be a body, to have a body, and to interact with other bodies, particularly when those bodies become strange, both grotesque and intriguing. Intimate and unsettling, The Whole Animal deals in how normalcy can become alien, loneliness, and self-discovery.

What are some of your favorite covers? Do you judge books by their covers, or do you just believe you don’t?