We’re excited to show off our latest cover from designer Will Staehle! Will is one of the most generous designers I know. Anytime I’ve worked with him, he’s provided a dozen incredibly well-conceived and beautifully realized comps. The only trouble with working with Will is deciding which comp makes the cover. After living with them (literally just taped up in the hallway) and consulting with the editor, author, and agent, we finally chose the design for The Unnoticeables, the first novel in a new series by author Robert Brockway.
See the full cover image as well as some alternate designs below!
Author Robert Brockway was blown away by the cover:
I’ve had a hard time defining The Unnoticeables. It’s part horror, part urban fantasy, part metaphysical punk rock pulp adventure (that’s a particularly weird part). People ask me to describe it, and I come up short. Now, I can just show them Will’s awesome cover. Everything here has significance. The faces, the brass knuckles, the skull, the gears—nothing is there purely for design purposes. It all has meaning. Even the overall inkblot theme (mild spoiler: that ain’t ink) cleverly ties into the events of the book. Will’s attention to detail goes all the way down to color choices: The Unnoticeables is a bright, garish book—it’s silly and brash and dumb and it does not care if you know it—but it also gets incredibly dark in places. As soon as I saw it, I felt like this cover reached out and punched me in the teeth for looking at it funny. That is exactly what The Unnoticeables is about.
I love the final design, but I simply have to show off some of these great alternates from Will Staehle:
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The Unnoticeables will be published by Tor Books in July 2015. For more information, here is the catalog copy about the book:
There are angels, and they are not beneficent or loving. But they do watch over us. They watch our lives unfold, analyzing us for repeating patterns and redundancies. When they find them, the angels simplify those patterns, they remove the redundancies, and the problem that is you gets solved.
Carey doesn’t much like that idea. As a punk living in New York City, 1977, Carey is sick and tired of watching the strange kids with the unnoticeable faces abduct his friends. He doesn’t care about the rumors of tarmonsters in the sewers, or unkillable psychopaths invading the punk scene—all he wants is drink cheap beer and dispense asskickings.
Kaitlyn isn’t sure what she’s doing with her life. She came to Hollywood in 2013 to be a stunt woman, but last night a former teen heartthrob tried to eat her, her best friend has just gone missing, and there’s an angel outside her apartment.
Whatever she plans on doing with her life, it should probably happen in the few remaining minutes she has left of it.
There are angels. There are demons. They are the same thing. It’s up to Carey and Kaitlyn to stop them. The survival of the human race is in their hands.
We are, all of us, well and truly screwed.
