I wanted to give you a close-up look at some of the stunning art that has gone into the covers of The Zombie Bible.
This painting by Scott Barrie depicts a zombie against the fiery backdrop of the burning of Walls in Strangers in the Land.
It is a truly desperate moment in the series:
Then the men were lighting the house to the left, and Devora could hear the moans of the dead within. The dry cedar cracked and sang its fierce death song as the fire spread faster than tears or prayer. The roof of the first house cracked open with a clap of thunder, then crumpled inward, and the moans within fell silent, buried beneath the broken timbers that crushed them down and covered them like a cairn of wood and charcoal rather than stone.
Devora spun in a slow circle, taking in the gray, filthy ash drifting down from the blazing rooftops, dark against the firelit air. Some of it fell on her arm and burned her, and she cried out, not knowing whether the ash had come from a burning bed or from one of the bodies of the People. She gazed in horror at the sky, dark with smoke.
This depiction of Father Polycarp’s gaze in What Our Eyes Have Witnessed is the remarkable work of UK photographer Danielle Tunstall, featuring the model Martyn Dalzell. It appeared as the front cover of the 2011 Dante’s Heart edition of the novel, and appears as a frontispiece in the 2012 47North edition.
Her eyes opened to him, and he gazed inside the rooms of her heart. He saw rooms that were locked and chained; he could almost hear the screams behind those shut doors. He saw other rooms that were vast and wide as oceans; in one, her love and faith in him, a faith so profound and unshakable that it shook him to see it.
And here is Scott Barrie’s cover for the novella Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, the opening salvo in the series:
At the well’s bottom, Yirmiyahu lay without waking, his body wracked with cold and dryness. In the city above, the walking corpses fed and felt no remorse for the cries or the panic of the living. This was a night of the dead, in a city of the dead. He knew it, he knew it. Surely God had left the city, fled the People who’d forsaken her, left them to lie in their darkness, lost and faithless. Surely everything above him was dead. In this well, in this clammy dark, he couldn’t know if there were any breathing people yet above him. If he were to cry out now, would the guards hear—and ignore—him, or would only the dead hear the cries of God’s navi? He couldn’t know.
And, most recently, here is Jeroen ten Berge’s evocative cover for No Lasting Burial, the novel that brings The Zombie Bible to the New Testament!
“And some days, out on the sea, they would haul up one of their too-empty nets and feel some weight in it, and looking down they would see rising out of the deep one of the dead tangled in the net, its face lifted toward them, eyes pale and white like those of a dead fish. Already reaching a hand toward the surface, its jaw opening.”
Scott Barrie, Danielle Tunstall, and Jeroen ten Berge — three remarkable cover artists. Also contributing their creativity to this ongoing series: the 47North design team, consisting, I assume, of veteran mapmakers who help me map and remap well-known biblical lands as sites of zombie apocalypse.
For example, here is the map for No Lasting Burial:
And one of the maps for Strangers in the Land:
And here is a close-up of a detail from the map of the siege of Refuge, also in Strangers in the Land:
My work has been blessed by some truly amazing artists and designers! If you are new to The Zombie Bible, I hope you will check out the series here.
Stant Litore
