Two boxes of Lesser Demons hit my doorstep this morning. I've gotta say, opening them up was a treat -- especially the moment when I pulled off the top slab of packing foam and stared down at Vincent Chong's cover image x 4. Which kind of froze me up for a second, because it's a sharp piece of work. I love the colors, especially, and the texture of the image.More than that, I love sunsets... especially desert sunsets. I love writing about them, and I've always wanted a cover that focused on that particular interest (I'll stop just short of calling it an obsession). Read most of my desert stories and you'll find a sunset in there somewhere. In Lesser Demons, you'll find a few, including a menacing sunset in "Carrion" and a melancholy one at the climax of "And What Did You See in the World?" Probably my personal favorite resides in my crime novel Saguaro Riptide, in the scene where hitman Woodrow Saad Muhammad sorts things out in Nevada's Valley of Fire before he goes gunning for Jack Baddalach. It's probably no surprise that that happens to be one of my favorite scenes in the book.
Of course, painting a sunset with words is quite different than doing it Mr. Chong's way, but hey... that's why I keep at it. Nothing I like better than working to get an image out of my head and down on paper, trying to craft those words in just the right way to conjure that image for someone else.
I'll admit that when it comes to sunsets, I can stare at the monitor for a long, long time trying to do that.
Of course, I can stare at a sunset for a long, long time, too.
