The Mud Ballad, by Jo Quenell

A little while back I was hired by the good folks at Weirdpunk Books to do the cover art for Jo Quenell’s debut novel The Mud Ballad. We ended up agreeing that the image above — a vanitas still life that draws considerable inspiration from the Dutch master Pieter Claesz — was a perfect fit for the themes and tone of Quenell’s book. It was a lot of fun working with everyone and I am pleased to say that they full-wrap cover design looks great. (Thanks Don Noble!)

I agreed to the project without having actually read Quenell’s book; the editor at Weirdpunk is an old friend and I took the gig in part based on my faith in his good judgement. Nevertheless, I must be honest that I was a little nervous about how the final product would turn out. I have a complicated love/hate relationship with indie press genre books and I was worried that I’d end up hating the book and regretting my involvement.

Those fears dissipated almost before I had finished the first paragraph. Quenell’s work is wonderfully inventive and they do a great job of propelling the reader forward. Unlike a lot of bizarro genre fiction, Quenell manages to structure the book in such a way that all the batshit crazy plot elements (circus freaks, violent mimes, reincarnated siamese twins, man-eating hogs, giant demons from the underworld, etc) actually feel organic to the story and the gonzo climax of the book is well earned. But most importantly: I love that The Mud Ballad has, at its core, a very real and relatable human story of loss and loneliness. Far too many genre books tend to feel like the author just wanted to throw a bunch of crazy shit at the wall and... I mean... that's fun for what it is, but it makes for a rather shallow reading experience. Mud Ballad managed to take a very relatable story about codependency and separation and wrap it up in horror tropes in a way that feels natural. Great stuff!