CLOAK OF DRAGONS / DEMONSOULED gag
Apropos to recent posts about cover design, in CLOAK OF DRAGONS I wrote an in-joke about cover design. It’s in a scene where Nadia is walking through an art gallery’s exhibit of Russian art:
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My eyes fell on a painting of a knight on horseback facing a carved standing stone. The knight looked weary, his head bowed, and there were bones scattered around the base of the stone. Something about the knight’s weariness spoke to me, and I had a disquieting memory of the Eternity Crucible, of repeating the same endless death over and over again.
I shoved aside that train of thought before it could get up to steam.
The accompanying plaque said that the portrait was a reproduction of a painting called “Knight At The Crossroads,” and the original had been painted about a hundred and thirty years before the Conquest by some guy named Viktor Vasnetsov. There were quite a few paintings by Vasnetsov throughout the exhibit, most of them showing either bogatyrs or figures from pre-Conquest Russian history.
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I added that scene because way back in 2011 and 2012 I couldn’t afford to use stock images for cover design. What I could afford to use, however, was public domain artwork from the 19th and early 20th century. One of those was Viktor Vasnetsov’s “Knight At The Crossroads”, which I used for the cover of DEMONSOULED for a while in 2012:
-JM
When I read that description in Cloak of Dragons i immediately thought of Mazael, even though i don’t think my kindle version had that cover. I didn’t think to look it up and check if it was a real painting.
Great work as always
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the book and the joke. 🙂
I wonder what her reaction would be like if she could have read it. Since it would presumably be something like
“Who rides straight forward shall know both hunger and cold.
Who rides to the right shall live, though his steed be dead.
Who rides to the left shall die, though his steed shall live.”
LOL. I’m pretty sure her reaction would be something along the lines of “screw that.” Then she’d think about it and choose the right way. She could always steal another horse.