May’s Book Cover Spotlight: Butterfly

This month’s Book Cover Spotlight reveals a fantastic book cover by a horror artist who is new to me: Steve Gilberts. You may notice that the book cover seems to be slim. Although I haven’t received my copy yet, I think the Cemetery Dance Signature Series horror books are slimmer than the normal trade size books.

As I’ve mentioned, this was my first introduction — that I’m aware of — to the artist Steve Gilberts. I’ve since seen his work on other books including the Stoker Award winning Taste of Tenderloin by Gene O’Neill and Kealan Patrick Burke’s The Master of the Moors, among others.

According to the website The Peculiar Art of Steven C. Gilberts, He not only did the full color cover, but also black and white illustrations for both endpapers, two signature sheets, six spot illustrations and eight full page illustrations for Butterfly.

The cover painting is a major reason I bought this book and now, after a long wait, I’m finally about to get my greedy little paws on it. Nonetheless, why did it help motivate me to buy the book?

Three elements of this painting keep drawing my eye:

• The first is the blue background, starting out dark and getting lighter as your eye travels across.
• The next was the muscular forearms that led my eye to the rest of the young man. His cross-armed pose reminded me of a corpse in a coffin. His face seems very much aware but his awareness is from somewhere else.
• There is something most disturbing about the gear being in the man’s abdomen. And it hints at the nature of the man.

	Butterfly (Cemetery Dance Signature Series #4) Author: Clark, Simon Book Cover: Steve Gilberts Format: Signed Limited Hardcover Type: Horror Novella Page Count: 84pp. Pub. Date: June 2010 Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
“I dream I am flying over forests, then seas, then cities. Then I am swooping down firing my guns at people. They run through the streets like frightened sheep, but I roar at them, kill them with my guns. When I have no more bullets my wings become scythes that cut them down.” The dying days of WW2: Nazi secret weapons draw lines of fire in Germany’s skies. In the depths of a forest the pilot of a ME163 rocket-plane battles not only the formations of allied bombers but a creeping menace that invades both his body and his mind. This is book four of the publishers Signature Series.
June 2010 (Signed Limited Hardcover — Cemetery Dance Pub.)

Here is the entire painting. It’s called Bitter Destiny and you can buy a print from Steven C. Gilberts’ online store. Click on the painting to visit. (This is not an affiliate link)

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Tagged as: Book Covers, Fun