BE - the cover

[Matthew Cissell]

With this cover we have an image of whose details we can not be too sure and of whose finality we can only speculate, but it is a first visual experience of the book, albeit in this digital world. If this is, more or less, the final version of the cover we might say some things.

As a starting point we might begin by looking at that old trick of painting: the vanishing point. This pulls the viewer into that unseen point(s) that gather lines together in infinity.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)  this touches on some themes that, judging from the excerpt - the illuminated tree (a burning bush?) - may feature in this novel as in AD and previous work.

The right and left sides of the cover ambiguosly stand as buildings or stacks, so we appear to be going down a street or corridor, but could it be that we are going up? The words "A Novel" look like the spine of a book we are ascending. The opposing face then becomes a soulless, nondescript building of the worst sort (here's your castle, your Tower) hovering above you. It is then these dark buildings and/or stacks that connect and separate these two planes of the novel and the tower, with you the reader scurrying in between.

para-what?
mc otis