The world ended with a cough. Jack Harlan kept the coffee good anyway.
Now his books finally look the part.
The Cough Is Loose and Staying Human have new covers, on Kindle and in paperback. DAMN JONES tailored them, and I could not be happier with the fit.
Jack would not have liked The Emperor’s New Clothes. He would have said the kid was right, the parade was a scam, and somebody should have brought a real jacket. These covers are the opposite of that. You can see the work. You can feel the weight. Nobody is pretending fabric is there when it is not.
This is Book 1. Jack in the swamp, gear on his back, and the dead coming up out of the water. It looks like something you would have found on a spinner rack in 1960, and that is exactly what I wanted. The Bougie Apocalypse is pulp. Now the cover says so before you read a word.
This is Book 2. Fire on the water, the trucks, the crew holding the line, and a lot more of the dead. Things get worse in Staying Human. The cover does not pretend otherwise.
The paperbacks got full wraparound covers. Front, back, and a plain spine. That is on purpose. Every single book keeps a clean spine so they look like a set on the shelf. When all three books are out, the omnibus will get the fancy spine.
A word about the artist. Damn Jones took a half-formed idea about carbon steel skillets, heirloom beans and zombies, and turned it into covers that feel like the series. If you need cover art, go look at his work: ko-fi.com/damnjones
Nothing changed inside the books. Same story, same Jack and Raych, same beans. If you already own them, you are set. And if you have the original covers, hang on to them. Those are collector’s pieces now. They will never be published again.
I learned that the fun way.
My wife ordered Staying Human without telling me. She checked her order status one day and saw the new cover staring back at her. When the book showed up, she walked in and said, “Can I get an author to sign this for me? And did you publish a new book?”
I had to explain that she had just bought herself a collector’s-edition original cover. The new clothes were already live on Amazon. She got the old ones, and that is the last printing of that look.
She is not alone. While I was wrestling KDP into accepting the new covers, some Staying Human paperbacks went out with the wrong ISBN printed inside. I am holding one right now. I have no idea how many there are. If yours is one of them, congratulations. You own a genuine misprint, the bookish version of an upside-down airplane stamp. Do not sell it to me cheap.
That is how this stuff works out sometimes. You order a paperback for your husband, the cover changes under you, and you end up holding the version that will never come off the press again. She got a story with the book. I got reminded why we do this at all.
If you have been reading the free serial and waiting for the right time to grab the expanded editions, that time is now. Grab them while you are thinking about it.
The Cough Is Loose: www.amazon.com
Staying Human: www.amazon.com
One quick note …. the 99 cent badge on the covers is to capture the old pulp feel, not the actual price. Although they will end up specially priced sometime before Christmas.
And Book 3, The Zombie War, is going up here twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Start with Chapter 1, Above The Valley: bougieapocalypse.com
Thank you for reading, sharing, and keeping Jack on the road.
Stay Human.
Eric W. Cowperthwaite
Cover Design by DAMN JONES
Loved working with you, Eric. More great covers to come!