Described as “the bastard love child of The Matrix, Jaws and The DaVinci Code,” Steven Hall’s debut novel invokes elements of science-fiction, psychological thriller and concrete poetry in order to weave a complex tale about trauma, identity and conceptual fish.
I did feel like there were a couple of obvious roads available to me — namely the use of shark-based imagery and/or the Rorschach ink-blot motif. I opted for neither of those things, as I felt like the title already did both. Instead, I wanted to take a more thematic approach.
My jacket is definitely a darker interpretation of Hall’s novel, which is actually a little playful in its style. However, I personally found it to be the kind of story that actually gets darker the longer you sit with it. The protagonist, Eric Sanderson, is essentially so traumatized by the death of his girlfriend that he he repeatedly blacks out and loses larger and larger chunks of his memory, and by extension, himself. The ocean, obviously, plays a huge roll in the imagery of this story, even if it is mostly a “conceptual” ocean, so I wanted to depict something that represented a kind of psychological drowning in order to create a more interpretive cover.
I knew early on that I wanted to use distorted text. This actually comes up in the actual pages of the novel as part of Hall’s concrete poetry — he creates facsimiles of letters and emails as well as other print documents which at times appear damaged. I didn’t go so far as to try and recreate fully realistic printed text, but I wanted the type to feel like a call back to some of those instances in the book. I also used some heavy blur filters to mimic the sense of fading and losing clarity that Eric Sanderson experiences with his memory. To this end, I used “Arial Black” as my starting point for its strong but simple form that can be easily manipulated without losing its integrity.
Desaturating the image here works to obscure the image just enough that you have to take a minute to really identify what you’re looking at. I also filtered it with a risograph effect to give it a printed feel as a nod to the printed facsimiles included in the novel.