Artwork by Beth White, design by Peter Lutjen

Irene Gallo, Art director at Tor.com, on the cover:

In a way this was a tough one—if only because all the cool-kids of Tor kept telling me how much they loved the book. The pressure was on.

The story is a reimagining of the Russian folk-tale of Koschei, the Deathless, set in Stalinist Russia. I remembered seeing (and being jealous of) Beth White’s cover for The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate for our sister company, Henry Holt. I thought the story-book quality of Beth’s artwork and the bold use of graphic shapes would due well to set Deathless apart in our catalog and in the stores.

Awesome. You can never go wrong with black and red and the iconic silhouettes stand out amongst all the generic photo manipulation and CG art that floods bookstore shelves these days. I also appreciate how the design gets more distressed as the eye moves down the image. Tons of characters, and you immediately get the sense about what you’ll find between the pages. I hadn’t heard of Deathless before I saw this cover, but count me now among the curious.

You can read more about the process and see more early designs at Tor.com.

From the Orbit Books blog:

Mixing real history and historical figures with magics and conspiracies, this novel imagines the Edinburgh of 1827, populated by mad alchemists who treat Frankenstein as textbook rather than novel, and by a criminal underclass prepared to treat with the darkest of powers.

The plot follows the progress of an officer of the recently formed Edinburgh City Police as he follows a trail of undead hounds, emptied graves, brutal murders and mob violence into the deepest and darkest corners of Edinburgh’s underworld – both literal and magical – and back again to the highest reaches of elegant, intellectual Edinburgh society.

It’s nice to see Orbit Books sticking to a style reminiscent of Ruckley’s Godless World trilogy. Good branding strategy, you know? The real-life photographed dude works a lot better for a period piece like this, rather than a Secondary World Fantasy. That quote is way too cheesy, though.

So many similar novels set themselves in London, so it’ll be nice to see Ruckley step outside that city and into one of the Scottish cities he’s familiar with (granted, Edinburgh in 1827 likely wasn’t too different from London in 1827, but still….) I think Ruckley’s style will likely transfer well to a gritty Urban Fantasy and should (hopefully) allow him to tell a story with a quicker pace than his sometimes-glacial Fantasy novels. Definitely looking forward to it.