What do y’all think of that picture? I’ve been adding some t-shirt designs to my Etsy store and my wife suggested I should have one with my picture on it. So, I used some app that turned my photograph into “art.” Petal said I should just use a regular picture on the shirt, but I kinda like the artsy look. What about about y’all?
Believe it or not, that has little bit to do with my topic today, in tracing my various steps in becoming a horror author. (If you haven’t read the first two posts of this series, I’ll link them here and here, if you’re so inclined; but it’s not necessary to read them all or in any particular order.) While my subtitle up there says the topic of the day is the Hardy Boys (no, not the wrestlers), the topic is just as much about art as it is those young reader mysteries.
Before I fell in love with writing—maybe even before I fell in love with baseball—I fell in love with drawing. And some of the earliest drawings I remember crafting were of crude monsters, with sharp teeth and long claws and menacing eyes, sometimes with hairy bodies and other times with tattoos and cut-off sleeves like the punks of the day. Indeed, I’ve always had a deep appreciation for art. And probably the art I liked (and still like) more than any other is the pulp style art, with colorful action scenes, sometimes featuring creatures from another planet or mad scientists or mobsters.
As a kid, I didn’t know this style of art was popularized through the covers of pulp magazines many years earlier. What I knew the style from was the series of Hardy Boys books I came upon at the Greenville Intermediate School library.
My dad introduced me to the Hardy Boys a year or two earlier, when I was in the third or fourth grade. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of book yet, and the copy he had of The House on the Cliff (I think that’s what it was) was an earlier version than what I would come to love, with only boring brown boards holding the book together, without even a tattered dust jacket to look at.
But the Hardy Boys books I found in the library in the fifth grade . . . you know the ones . . .
I wish I could say all the books above are mine. Alas, no. Only The Tower Treasure there at the top is mine, the rest provided courtesy of Google. I wouldn’t want the ones from the bottom two pictures anyway, because they’re the newer versions. But the art is the same as from my childhood.
Isn’t the art beautiful on these suckers? This is what drew me to begin reading the Hardy Boys. Sure, the stories were good. Some were even great. I especially enjoyed, as I recall, The Haunted Fort, Danger on Vampire Trail, and The Disappearing Floor, all three of which, not coincidentally, have horror as their central theme. But it was the art that really drew me to the books, more so than the stories. This theme has continued throughout my life.
“But, PC3, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover!”
Bullshit! Total bullshit, I tell you!
If a book has beautiful or interesting cover, pick that sucker up. It means someone put care into it. The story may suck; you never know until you read it. But the art on the cover will always be there, if you take care of your tome. I have a whole host of old pulp men’s adventure books that I’ve never read but love the covers. I have a lot of horror books I can say the same about, though I’ve read far more of them.
And for whatever reason, the best covers on the planet right now are coming from the indie horror community. Look at the covers of books by Aron Beauregard or Edward Lee. Look at the books put out by the small presses, like Eraserhead Press and Evil Cookie and Deadite. Look for art by Justin T. Coons, William Skaar, Lynne Hansen, and many others. There is a lot of really fucking good art out there. And a lot of them, just like those Hardy Boys books back in the day, have really fun tales on the inside too.
Though I’ve failed a few times, I always try to incorporate excellent artwork with my books. Here are a few examples: the first two by Justin T. Coons, the last by my brother Paul Harrison.
Yeah, I'm a sucker for these old covers.
I would wear the shit out of that shirt. If if it becomes available I will be buying it!
Cheers, Spike