I had some fun creating the cover for the book. I had to. Tweaking the image brightness and contrast was a nightmare. Anyway, this is the back cover of the galley proof edition that I made in September 2008. The galley proof was essentially a rough draft of the novel, which I had printed up to see how it looked. It was a good thing I did. While the cover images looked fine on my screen, they were much too dark on a physical book. I brightened and color-corrected the images for the final version.

There are a couple of obscure in-jokes in the galley proof's back cover blurb, both having to do with video box blurbs for low budget fantasy movies. The "mad, androgynous rabble" part is taken from the video box blurb of a movie called She (1982, released 1985), supposedly based on the classic H. Rider Haggard novel but not really. In the film, there is a crowd of mutants, but it a real stretch to call it a high point worth citing on the box.

The second in-joke is the last line, the "epic final battle on the surface of the moon!" This is a reference to my all-time favorite "bad" movie, Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989), reviewed many times and in many places right here on RinkWorks. The box blurb of the VHS version of the movie mentions a "blazing final battle on the surface of the moon," as well as a quest to recover "the egg of the mythical Roc." Neither of these things are in the actual movie. There isn't even a mention of the moon or a Roc. Unfortunately, the box blurb of the DVD edition is corrected.

"Snook Draddots," by the way, is the fictional author of the RinkWorks feature Slapdash City, a parody of bad personal web sites in the days before social networking enabled them to be even worse.