Someone Else's Book Club: Cover Reveal

 

From the back cover:

Saving the world was never on the reading list.

Kevin Raulston wants to keep his life simple, at least as simple as one can as a used bookstore owner who hunts extraterrestrials for a shadowy private organization known only as Corporate. But it is the year of Y2K and the world is on edge, fearing the worst. When an extraterrestrial crashes his book club meeting—leaving behind a missing book club member, a mysterious serum, and a very confused married couple, Chris and Suzanne Pershing—Kevin is pulled into a Y2K conspiracy involving mutated humans, a secret lab beneath a ghost town bank, and a potential romance with his bartender crush.

To survive, Kevin must do the unthinkable: train the all-too-eager and thrill-seeking Pershings to fight aliens. People who haggle over the plot points of books like The Rapture of the Follies are now armed with glitchy weapons, metaphysical theories, and a disturbing level of confidence. Along the way, the book club will face bizarre extraterrestrials, impossible tech, and Kevin’s tendency to eat his feelings.

It all sounds like some bad sci-fi novel.
Unfortunately, it’s his life.

*

Someone Else's Book Club was not the book I started to write after the release of Kilroy Was Here. That book's sequel was halfway through the crappy first draft stage when I hit a wall with plotting, as I usually in those early versions. Frustrated and blocked, I asked readers of Kilroy Was Here which elements of that story stuck with them. What did they want to know more about? A couple of people stated they wanted more of Marlene and Clara, a pair of Herpezoid hunters. I do like those two a lot and I have a draft of a novel focused on them that is in its own state of crappy first draft. Other suggestions included more of the backstory about Corporate and its founder, Simon Tybalt. Some wanted to know more about the Herpezoids. But a couple of other folks had questions about the alien-hunting book club (spoiler, if you haven't read Kilroy Was Here). That idea consumed me so I started playing around with it. Soon, I was deep in plotting and revising and rewriting. I knew the story of Kevin Raulston and his Herpezoid-hunting book club had to be told. 

While there was much to figure out with Someone Else's Book Club, one thing was certain: I wanted the cover to be designed by dear lifelong friend Tony Miller. I have known Tony since we were first graders at O'Neal Elementary School in Poplar Bluff, MO. A lifelong comics and sci-fi/fantasy fan, Tony has been drawing most of his life. He is really quite brilliant, actually. But I didn't commission him simply because of his considerable talents. Tony designing the cover just made sense.

First of all, the main character and narrator of Kilroy Was Here is named Tony Pershing. While the character is an amalgam of teens I knew over the years, he is named for my friend Tony. Second, Tony spends a lot of time in his favorite book store, Someone Else's Books. That fictional book store, owned by Kevin Raulston in Kilroy Was Here, is based on an actual bookstore Tony owned in Poplar Bluff for many years, The Book Shop. So, who better to design the cover for Someone Else's Book Club than the guy who inspired a couple of major elements in the Kilroy universe?

I provided Tony with the basics of what I was looking for and I think he delivered the goods. The cover captures the spirit of the book and showcases Tony's skill as an artist. I'm beyond thrilled with his work and so happy to share it with the readers of Someone Else's Book Club.