This was brought to my attention via seanan_mcguire.

Rachel Stark has made a disturbing observation about a recent trend with book covers for YA fiction: Cover Trends in YA Fiction: Why the Obsession With Elegant Death?

Go on, read that first.

Now, when I first heard about this, I had a "What's the big deal?" approach. I'm into horror as well as YA, so my interests tend towards the macabre anyway--which probably comes as no surprise, considering the name I chose for this blog. Images of (fake) dead things don't particularly bother me as long as they're artfully done, as most of these seem to be. In my head I likened it to that opening montage from the movie Ginger Snaps, in which the two girls pose themselves in various gruesome photographs for a school project--drawing both applause from their classmates and a loud, disgusted diatribe from their teacher in the process.

Furthermore, since dark YA is mostly what I write, I imagined that maybe the subgenre is opening up a bit, which for me would be a good thing. Because why would the folks who decide things like what to put on book covers be using images of dead girls if not to draw an audience that likes dark stories?

So I took a look at some of the other book covers in my collection. You know what I notice? All my adult horror doesn't seem to favor images of dead girls to draw that audience. It's all shadowy silhouettes, dark forests, and eerie still lifes of things like empty chairs or abandoned buildings.

Then I took a look at some YA horror covers--proper horror, not just paranormal with a hefty dose of romance.


Here's what I found:

Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement, which I loved, has one of those eerie still life images--a pram with a ghastly mobile of sharp things above it. Totally creepy, and fits the story inside perfectly.

However, take a look at the cover for her new book, The Space Between. See anything odd there? Yep, that looks like an elegant dead girl to me. Maybe she's just wiped out, I don't know, but the aesthetic is the same.

Next, I checked out Lisa McMann's Cryer's Cross. I read the hardback edition, with one of best covers I've seen on a YA horror--another eerie still life, this time with an empty desk scrawled in a wild hand. Terrific cover. Look what they've done with the paperback edition. The girl on the cover doesn't appear to be dead, but that's definitely a submissive pose, and more importantly, WHAT is going on here? The creepy desk is actually relevent to the plot of this book--the romance is secondary. If I saw that cover in the store? I'd walk right by it and leave it on the shelf. The original cover was fantastic, and it's the reason I read it.

Lastly I'll just mention briefly the difference between the first, second and third books of Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth series, because is where the growing trend towards dead girls is most obvious I think: the first book has two covers, one with a girl peeking between the branches of a dead tree, the other with a girl looking simply windblown against a foresty backdrop. The latter two? Dead girls, lying on the ground, one in the surf of the ocean, the other on what appears to be a set of a railroad tracks. Something has definitely changed, and not for the better.

It's all well and good to say don't judge a book by it's cover, but we all do. Covers make a difference. So the question on the table is, what kind message are these books with submissive, dead, or simply weakened girls on the covers sending to their readers? Is this some kind of throwback to the Victorian era, when women drank arsenic to make themselves pale, and squeezed themselves into corsets that crushed their ribs and made them faint (gracefully, of course) onto chaise longues? Or is something more insidious at work here?

Make no mistake--I am not making any judgments about the quality of writing of any of these books based on their covers. In fact, the ones I mentioned I have read, and enjoyed very much, especially Yovanoff's. Authors rarely have control over what kind of cover their books will get. That's someone else's job, usually. And may I also point out that some of these images, macabre though they may be, are really beautiful and enticing.

What confuses me most is that, judging by the few of these books I have read, the heroines inside their pages are NOT submissive. They're tough, resourceful, and intelligent. Sometimes selfish or a little naive, but for the most part, they aren't at all like the images in these covers would make them out to be. But the covers are what entice people to read books, or should be. They are taking strong young women and turning them into prettified zombies. And guess what else? It's working. They are drawing a crowd, and gaining readers and buyers.

Why do you suppose that is?