For me, much of the fun of designing alternate covers for books comes from thinking about the books in new ways. A book cover can't convey the whole of a novel. It's the front door and threshold of a book, not the whole house—a brief moment of beckoning and invitation that should capture something that is both true to the book and intriguing enough to tempt the reader inside.
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| ©Suzanne Fox 2021 May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission Sources: all stock images |
My covers for the quartet of novels for which Collins is best known—The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, and No Name—focus on two elements that all four books share. The first is an element of detection. Collins helped pioneer the the mystery genre, and even the novels that have little or no explicit detection are structured around the revelation of secrets, the exposure of deception, and the need to assess multiple versions of the truth. Doubles, dualities, and doppelgängers pervade his work as well, most obviously in The Woman in White but in many of his other novels as well.
In this cover series, motifs from each story are inset into the lens of a magnifying glass, that familiar image of detection. The backgrounds for each cover (the same image used four times in mirrored pairs) suggest one of the novel's places, whether the weedy knotted turf of a graveyard or the stone of a country residence. As always, my goal was to create covers that suggest the books' original era and yet have a contemporary "vibe."
The Frozen Deep isn't a Collins novel, but rather an amateur theatrical Collins produced with his close friend Charles Dickens. It doesn't really belong with the others, but I had a glorious image of cracked ice I couldn't resist using.
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© Suzanne Fox 2021 May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission Sources: all stock images |
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© Suzanne Fox 2021 May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission Sources: all stock images |
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© Suzanne Fox 2021 May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission Sources: all stock images |
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© Suzanne Fox 2021 May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission Sources: all stock images |