I was so turned off by the cover art for Kelley Armstrong’s Personal Demon that I didn’t even feel like requesting a review copy, much less actually purchasing one. This is no reflection on Ms. Armstrong’s considerable writing skills, but an expression of my unwillingness to be seen reading anything that looked so much like an X-rated version of those R.L. Stine Goosebumps books that were popular when I was in elementary school:


See what I mean? The neon font (which is even brighter in real life)! The vaguely sexual pose involving a young woman feeling up a gargoyle! Why have Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld covers gotten steadily worse over the course of her career? Shouldn’t the opposite be true? She’s a big-name author now!

Anyway, I stuck to my guns for over a year, but eventually my mother bought a paperback copy, and I folded like a cheap suit. It was there and it was free, so I read it, my stance on butt-ugly cover art be damned. And you know what I discovered? Not only is the cover hideous, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the book. Nobody fondles a gargoyle in this story, and I’m pretty sure the heroine, half-demon tabloid reporter Hope Adams, never wears a strapless leather corset. Instead, Personal Demon is another entertaining installment in Armstrong’s horror/romance/suspense series, with a complex, well-structured plot that owes a considerable debt to The Godfather. (It focuses on a conflict between the “Cabal”—Armstrong’s supernatural mafia—and a Miami gang of otherworldly young thugs.)

I’m not sure who makes cover art decisions, but I hope whoever made this one has found a different line of work. Because when Laurell K. Hamilton’s most recent release (Blood Noir) has a cover that is both more interesting and less kinky than that of a Kelley Armstrong book, something is seriously amiss with the publishing world.

Labels: Book Cover, Kelley Armstrong