The artist for my cover introduces himself:

Slava Nesterov, young artist and illustrator from Perm, Russia. He has participated in many exhibitions. He considers himself an heir of the school of socialist realism, but has moved away from the canon, and creates graphic works imbued with symbolism and meaning. His work is alert to social issues and portrays the internal contradictions of the human person in a surrealistic manner.

Slava also did the artwork for the previous book from my publisher – Mark SaFranko’s The Suicide.

The story of the cover for my book is long and convoluted – Slava was the third artist to attempt a design. When his name was first touted I looked him up and was delighted to see the fantastic work here.

Initially the publisher sent him some of my stories and he returned sketches. These seemed a bit too literal to me. His artwork online had vision, it was an unsettling blend of the human and inhuman / animate and mechanical. There were already two or three images online which I felt matched my fiction, in ways which I lack the ability to express. The boy with the black crows over his head was one. I asked my publisher if there was any reason we couldn’t use some of his existing images …. and things went from there.
[huge_it_gallery id=”1″]