Kerry Allen

Ooh… naked guy in chains with a sword? Three of my very favorite things! Sounds exciting!

But maybe too exciting. Could you make it bland and colorless and devoid of personality? Kthxbai.

The last two Cole covers looked like every other lone-half-naked-dude book on the shelves, but they were preferable to this one.

I LIKE the “cartoony” covers the IAD series started with. They’re clinchy and colorful and fun and distinctive—yanno, representative of the stories inside.

This is just kind of… bleh. Nothing about it says, “Pick me up and read me, for I have the power to make all your dreams come true. Don’t believe me? Only one way to find out. I double dog dare ya.”

Color me bummed.

Or, more to the point, gray me bummed.

Next book, they’ll probably put a tasteful little castle or flower on it.

I shall console myself with loving glances at this one, which sits face-out on my shelf.

Golly, can’t for the life of me figure out why this one rings my bell…

This was my delivery room book.

Everything an Eighties book cover should be and more.

Way more.

Her blue eye shadow. Her stripe of rouge. Her feathered hair. Her poofy ruffled dress. Her heaving bosoms.

The half-nekkid dude who, seriously, looking at him right now, kinda puts me in mind of Jet Li.

The “Catch me, I’m passing out” “Never fear, my love, that’s just the chloroform kicking in” pose.

The clashing colors (lavender and tangerine—there’s a bridesmaid’s dress from hell waiting to happen). The PURPLE FOIL embossed title.

The fine print at the top: “Her heart was innocent, but her body cried out for his touch!”

And the back copy is no doubt cringe-inducing pr0n of the worst sort to the sort of people who cringe:

BRAZEN INNOCENCE

Wide-eyed Caitlin McGlory [yeah, I know, isn't it great!] had no illusions about Quinn Jones. From their first meeting, she knew he’d be a fearsome enemy, a powerful ally, and a magnificent lover. With his jet-black hair and storm-grey eyes, he seemed dashing, devilish, and utterly desirable. Perhaps it was foolish—even dangerous—to flirt with such a man, but Caitlin couldn’t resist. She wanted to see his eyes grow dark with passion, feel his arms pull her close to the heat of his lean, hard body…

WORLDLY DESIRE

Cynical Quinn had no doubts about Caitlin. The instant he saw her, he wanted her in his bed. With her glorious auburn hair and sparkling blue eyes, she was bold, beautiful, and completely bewitching. Perhaps it was unwise—even reckless—to toy with such an innocent temptress, but Quinn couldn’t stay away. He wanted to whisk Caitlin off to his isolated Canadian castle and treat her silken flesh to long nights of endless loving. He would worship every luscious curve, every hidden treasure, until she begged for more of his tantalizing

TENDER TORMENT

Any clue whatsoever what the plot might be, based on that? *pfft* We don’t need no stinkin’ plot on the cover! We gots a prettiful picture!

Inside: I love you. I hate you. You’re acting like a spoiled child. And you’re being a bully. Train me so I can bag a rich, titled husband. Screw that, I’m not letting another man have you. My game, my rules, prettyboy. Wh-wh-what do you mean, he got tired of my games and left me for good? But I loooooooove him! Silly chit, I could never leave you.

That is the spirit of Zebra circa 1985 right there, ladies and gentlemen, and in spite of it all (or is it because of it?), it was motherhumpin’ awesome when I was 11 and remains one of my enduring faves.

Originally appeared May 24, 2007

Say what you will about the heaving mantitty clinch covers. I’ll start. They’re embarrassing, laughable, and do nothing to increase the respectability of the romance genre.

But.

I was reading Johanna Lindsey books with their dawn-of-Fabio covers when my contemporaries were still reading Laura Ingalls Wilder. When I left home, I needed my own copies (because my mother is selfish and wouldn’t share with her baby). At that point, the trend in cover art was toward abstract and flowery, so that’s what’s on my shelf now.

(The exception being Tender Rebel, for which I guilted mum into taking the pristine new copy with its flower power and squirreled away the clinch copy with its cracked binding and yellowed pages for myself. Can you blame me? It’s pre-Fabio. The hero’s shirtless shoulder is nicely muscled but not overly so and unobscured by the overlong greasy locks that would take over a couple of years later. The sight of it still makes my heart go pitty-pat.)

I thought the flower movement was a good thing, as I was always repulsed by Fabio and could happily live without seeing him every time I reached for a romance novel.

A funny thing happened that kinda sorta changed my mind about the heaving mantitty clinch covers, though. As I was entering my abstract flowery J. Li’s into LibraryThing, I thought, “Romance titles are nonsensical. Gentle Rogue indeed. Gag. I have no idea what’s actually in this book.” Then I clicked the link to change the cover art.

Pow! “Oh, that’s James and Georgie’s story.” She’s posing as a cabin boy. He’s not fooled. She doesn’t know he knows and believes he believes he’s putting the moves on a boy. Hilarity ensues.

Instant. Product. Recognition.

Guess what I put in my TBR to be enjoyed again.

We remember beefcake-poofy dress covers. They might make us cringe, but we remember them. They’re colorful. They try to titillate by showing empirically attractive people consumed with lust in various stages of getting it on. They engage the interest in a way flowers or a lone shirtless man or a grayscale headshot or a cutesie cartoon or some anonymous piece of scenery never can.

Chances are, if you remember a cover with Fabio wearing neon green eyeshadow, you can remember something inside the book, too. Perhaps only that there was no mention of the hero having transvestite tendencies, but that’s something.

I don’t want to be seen in public with a heaving mantitty clinch cover any more than you do, but I now have to admit they serve their purpose. There’s no mistaking that style of art as belonging to any other genre. When you grab a hunk of heaving mantitty, you know exactly what you’re getting.

The current reprint of Tender Rebel, by the way, has a castle on the front. There is no frickin’ castle anywhere in that book. It is not a visual that evokes a feeling of romance for me and is never going to trigger a fond memory of the story within those pages.

So I’ll be hanging onto my battered 20-year-old copy, thanks very much.

I don’t judge a book by its cover. Maybe it’s because I buy 99.99 percent of my books online, and it’s hard to judge the teeny-tiny image available. Maybe it’s because I know cover creation has little to nothing to do with the content of the book, which is what I really care about. Maybe I’m just not that visually oriented.

There are people, however, who won’t touch a book if they find the cover offputting for whatever reason. There are some covers that even I, brazen wench that I am, would dread taking out in public. There are some covers, though, that stand out as exceptional. Here are a few of my favorites:

Generally speaking, I don’t want to see a character’s face on the cover because it never coincides with my imagination, and my idea of an attractive male face is oddly out of sync with the world of male modeling.

A notable exception is the cover of Lynn Viehl’s Dark Need. This is not at all how I envisioned Lucan (the male lead in the book), but I like looking at this guy’s face so much, it replaced that of one of my own characters in my mind.

.

I think J.R. Ward’s covers are pretty tasteful. Technically, that’s a clinch, but the monochromatic scheme tones it down and classes it up.

.

The covers of Shana Abe’s Drakon books depict no people at all.

(If I could find this dragon in the form of a mirror frame, it would be on my wall right now.)

However, my mother returned this book to me unread because she could not identify it on sight as a romance novel. I ’splained it to her and gave it back. She read it and really enjoyed it, but she would have passed on it, based on the cover, as being something other than what she was interested in reading…

I even have a favorite among the 1980s bodice-ripper covers, so much so that I bought my mother a brand-new copy (with the abstract flowery cover that was en vogue at that time) so I could take this one with me when I left home.

I have a shoulder fetish, what can I say? (Man shoulder, that is. I want to tell her to fix her sleeve.)

(This cover also snuck in just before the Dawn of Fabio. The next book in the series was not so fortunate.)

.

I don’t read historicals anymore, but I think the covers of Liz Carlyle’s latest series are beautiful.

.

The first thing I jotted down when planning this post was “The hero isn’t running around half naked in the book, so why does he always have to be half naked on the cover?” So I cracked up when I dropped by Meljean Brook’s site, where she had posted the cover of Kresley Cole’s next paranormal (my first glimpse of a book I have been waiting and waiting for) with the caption “Clothes are way hawt on a hero.”

So true. Enough with the heaving bosoms of both genders. I’ll spearhead a charity clothing drive for cover models if that’s what it takes to supply shirts for them all.

(Note that the woman on Cole’s cover is wearing a fabulous gravity-defying designer gown. You can have it. Ms. Brook and I will be duking it out for the guy’s coat. She’s a tiny thing—I bet I can take her.)

What are your favorite romance covers and why, and for those ruled by that first visual impression, what cover qualities make for an auto-reject?