Just thought this was cool, is all. Art by Jillian Tamaki.
Posts Categorized: Cover Art
Looks exactly like all his other UK covers, so I suppose I’ll just re-direct you here for my opinion. The US cover art, which I prefer, is here.
You know, last night, when I stumbled across this cover, my first reactions was:
:(
There aren’t enough sad faces in the world to express my dismay.
This morning, though, I looked at it again and thought:
I like the idea, and appreciate that it’s says ‘Urban Fantasy’ without the general cliches, but the execution is just weird. You know, it’s actually kina cool, except for the floating, super-imposed angel.
Regardless of which opinion is correct, I have high expectations that the book beyond the covers, The Dirty Streets of Heaven will be very good. Because, you know, it’s Tad Williams.
This might be the greatest cover of all time. I can just imagine GRRM rocking out while writing The Armageddon Rag, leading to a bad acid trip where the entirety of the A Song of Ice and Fire series plays out amongst the dishes drying in his sink.
Jack Glass is the murderer. We know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged. Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, JACK GLASS is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain. JACK GLASS has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits and comes with liberal doses of sly humour. Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and SF via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challanges notions of crime, punishment, power and freedom. It is an extraordinary novel.
I’ve not read any of Roberts’ work, but I’ve always been a big fan of what Gollancz does with his covers. Jack Glass is colourful and interesting, and the mix between the classic style of stained glass and the rocketship indicates that you’re looking at SF that doesn’t fall alongside its more traditional genre-mates. Roberts takes chances and challenges readers with his fiction; it’s nice to see Gollancz doing the same with his cover art.
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