Under Cover: The Laughing God Trilogy Finds its Visual Language

The first cover I designed for Daevil’s Bells was not for Daevil’s Bells. It was for a book called Secrets of Dom Arjona, which is what I thought I was writing in 2017. The cover I built matched the book I thought I had: an erotic gothic thriller about a wealthy, secretive man whose estate hid things no servant was meant to see.

The image at the center of that first cover was a photograph I had taken years earlier in the grand hall of Villa Grazioli, an old estate outside Rome where I once stayed for a stretch and wrote The Olive Grove from start to finish. Villa Grazioli is the kind of place that does not let you go. Frescoes climb its walls and pour across its ceilings. Stone figures hold up the architraves with the patient, slightly weary expressions of bodies that have been holding up ceilings for four hundred years. The figure in my photograph was an atlante — the male counterpart of the caryatid, named for the Titan condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders. He stood in the grand hall with one arm raised above his head, his face turned half away, the warm drape of a Renaissance fresco glowing behind him like a slow private fire. I came home with hundreds of photographs from that trip. His was the one I came back to.

There were satyrs in those frescoes. Painted ones — half-men with curling horns and goat legs, leering and laughing and piping from the corners of the ceiling, the way satyrs have done in Italian villa decoration since the Renaissance pulled them out of the classical past. I had been studying them long before I started writing about them. The Olive Grove, the book I wrote at Villa Grazioli, was a satyr book — my first sustained attempt to take a satyr seriously, to grant him interiority, to refuse the convention that turns him into ornament or punchline. I had no idea then that I would write satyrs again years later, in a different register, with a much darker theology around them. The atlas in the grand hall and the satyrs on the ceiling belonged to the same iconographic world I had been quietly inhabiting for years: the world of the male body offered to the gaze, the body as god and as servant and as creature, the body that holds up the architecture of the room and the body that watches from the painted shadows above it. Some images stay with you long after you have stopped looking at them.

The bones of Ca’Thessana are most directly Villa Grazioli’s: the long corridors, the shuttered rooms, the painted ceilings of saints and satyrs. That is where the seed was planted. The full architecture came from the whole pilgrimage—the plural rooms, the secret galleries, the painted heavens, the courtly silence, the sense of a building so old and so rich that its walls have absorbed things they should not have. The figures who hold up its rooms have become the kind of figures who watch quietly while terrible and beautiful things happen beneath them. The atlas I had photographed at Villa Grazioli was the book’s first physical contact with itself. He had been waiting in my photo library for a decade for me to understand what he was. He was waiting for the rest of the house to arrive.

So when I needed a first cover, I reached for him. The cover I built around him was beautiful and wrong, and it took me nine years to understand why. The answer turned out to be the same answer I needed for the manuscript itself.

The atlas was the right kind of figure on the wrong kind of cover. I want to be precise about this, because it is the place where I learned the most. In a genre dominated by female bodies sold to a presumed female reader who is being asked either to identify with the woman on the cover or to fear her, a male figure at the center of a dark erotic fantasy is the harder choice and, I still believe, the more interesting one. It inverts the gaze. It declares that the desire driving the narrative belongs to a woman looking outward, not to a woman being looked at. That is the gaze the book itself runs on. Ouida understood this in the nineteenth century. In Maremma—her late, slow, sensuous novel of a girl living alone in an Etruscan tomb in the Tuscan wilderness who shelters a fugitive she finds half-dead in the marshes—still captures, better than almost anything written since, the particular weather of a woman whose entire inner life is organized around tending and looking at a body she has chosen. Jacqueline Carey carries the same flame in our century. Female desire as the engine of the narrative, the male body as the object of contemplation, the prose lush enough to bear the weight of both. That is the lineage I wanted to stand inside, and the cover had to declare it before the reader had read a word. That part of the cover I would defend even now.

What was wrong was the role I had asked the atlas to play. An atlas is, by definition and by function, a servant figure. He bears weight. He holds up the architecture. He is structural, not sacred. No matter how compelling his body or how lush the fresco behind him, an atlas cannot be the central object of any room, because an atlas exists to hold the relic up. He cannot be the relic. I had put a servant on the cover of a book whose true subject was the thing the servants were tending. The book needed an object at its center, not the figure bearing it.

The title was the second mistake, and structurally the larger one. Secrets of Dom Arjona placed the antagonist’s name in the position of greatest visual prominence. The cover was selling the wrong character because the manuscript, at the time, was about the wrong character. For years I had been writing the book as a mystery centered on what a powerful man was concealing. The story I actually needed to tell was about what a young woman would choose, and keep choosing, until the choosing itself became who she was. The protagonist had to walk to the front of her own book. Before she could, I had to understand that the book was not about the man’s secrets at all. It was about the substance that bound everyone in his house together—a drug, a sacrament, a tear distilled from a flower and from the body of something not quite human—and about the woman who would come to love it more than she loved her own life. Once I understood that, the title resolved on its own. Secrets of Dom Arjona became Daevil’s Bells, and the cover I had been refining for years was suddenly a cover for a book that no longer existed.

So I started over.

The version I arrived at is built around a single object, and the object is real. The bottle at the center of the cover is an eighteenth-century snuff bottle: a precious vessel made to hold a powdered, addictive substance that its owner inhaled, passed between hands, and treated as a mark of refinement. I did not invent its symbolism. I inherited it. A historical snuff bottle is already a small reliquary for an addiction. It is already a beautiful container for the very thing that erodes the person carrying it. The eighteenth century carved these bottles from rare materials and crowned them in gold because it understood, instinctively, what every addict eventually understands: a drug is most dangerous when its container is beautiful.

Daevil’s Bells is, at the level of its deepest formal metaphor, a book about containment. The vessel holds the substance. The substance binds the cult. The cult feeds the faith. The faith sustains the god. Each link exists to serve the next, and the whole sequence runs in only one direction. There is no exit from it—only further addiction.

And then, by the end, the chain finds its final term. Liriel becomes the vessel herself. She is what the substance now fills. She is what the cult now holds. She is what the faith now requires. She is what the god is sustained by. The snuff bottle on the cover is the smallest reliquary in the sequence, the prefiguration in miniature of what she will become. The cover is, quite literally, a portrait of her future.

I framed it the way museum catalogs photograph artifacts and the way medieval reliquaries are displayed in cathedral treasuries: as a thing on view, behind glass, behind ornament, behind the thick patina of years. I wanted the reader to feel as if they were standing before an object they were not entirely sure they were allowed to see. Most fantasy covers put their central image in motion—a hooded figure striding, a sword raised, a sigil glowing. Mine is perfectly still. The stillness is the argument. The drug at the heart of this book does not pursue anyone. The cult that distills it preaches free will. The god they distill it for is a deity of joy. They wait, and waiting is enough. A cover in motion would have been lying about a book whose deepest horror is how patiently the terrible thing stays in one place.

The background is a millefleur tapestry—thousand flowers, the medieval textile vocabulary that gave us The Lady and the Unicorn at the Cluny and the Devonshire hunting tapestries at the V&A. Millefleur was the iconographic ground of feminine devotion, courtly love, and sacred allegory. It is the visual register in which the medieval imagination staged its most contemplative scenes, and it is almost always read as benign. I chose it for that reason. The world of Daevil’s Bells is, on its surface, exactly that kind of garden—sensuous, devotional, lavishly ornamented, the sort of space a young woman could walk into and mistake for paradise. But a millefleur ground is not, in fact, a garden. It is a catalog of plants, deliberately ahistorical, arranged for symbolic rather than botanical truth. The medieval weaver chose each species for what it meant, not for where it grew. My millefleur, accordingly, is a catalog of alchemy. The flowers behind the bottle are the same flowers from which the substance inside the bottle was distilled. The whole composition is a closed system: the tapestry holds the garden, the garden produces the tear, the tear fills the bottle, the bottle is the object of devotion, the devotion sustains the cult that tends the garden. The cover is a single recursive theology with no exit.

And then there is the spider.

The spider was the bravest decision in the design, and the one I almost lost my nerve on twice. A spider on a perfume bottle is wrong. It is the small unwelcome thing inside the beautiful object, the alien presence at the center of the relic, the visual equivalent of finding something moving on your plate. But the spider on this cover is not a generic spider. It is a specific one. There is a chapter, early in the book, in which Liriel comes upon a spider’s web with a butterfly already caught in it. The butterfly is still alive. She watches it for a long time. Then she chooses, deliberately, to walk away and leave the web undisturbed. The spider has to eat. That sentence is the ethical pivot of the entire book in five words. It is the moment Liriel stops being a victim of the cult’s logic and becomes a practitioner of it. It is the moment she decides, on her own and without coercion, that the predation she once would have interrupted is in fact natural, beautiful, and in some sense holy. The spider on the cover is her spider. It sits on the bottle that holds the drug she will not refuse, on the cover of a book that begins with her trying to save herself and ends with her standing very still in front of a web she will not disturb. Anyone who reads the book and then returns to the cover will recognize her there: small, gold, watching, waiting to be fed.

The palette is teal, green, and gold rather than the obvious dark-fantasy red-and-black, because red-and-black is the visual language of menace, and menace is too easy. Daevil’s Bells is not a menacing book. It is a seductive one. Teal is the color of patina on old bronze. It is the color of moss on a garden wall that has not been disturbed in a hundred years. It is the color of mineral water rising from a hidden thermal spring, the color of stone basins fed by warm underground rivers, the color of the slow private weather inside a walled garden in late afternoon. Gold is the color of reliquaries, of altar furniture, of wealth that has been in a family for three centuries. Together they declare: this is old, this is rich, this is private, you are being shown something most people never see. That is the promise of the book, made before the reader has read a word.

The typography was the last decision and the one I labored over longest. The flowing script of Daevil’s against the heavier architectural letters of TEARS enacts, in two words, the central tension of the book itself: the soft thing and the hard thing in the same breath. Sensuality against severity. Lush against ritualized. The body that yields and the doctrine that does not. Stare at the title long enough, and you can see the whole book in the kerning and the devil tails.

How much of any of this will a reader consciously notice? Almost none of it. What I want them to notice is the feeling—the sense that they are entering into a foreboding adventure. Cover design at its best does not tell the reader what the book is about. It tells the reader what reading the book will feel like. The atlas on that first cover told her the book would be sensual, and it was right about that. But it offered her a servant when the book needed a relic. The reliquary on this one tells her the book will be consecrated in some private, slightly dangerous way. 

The cover and the manuscript took the same number of years to find their final shape. That is not an accident. They were the same problem from two different angles. The book had to figure out what it was about, and the cover had to figure out how to look at the thing the book was about, and neither could be right until the other was. I was trying to design a cover for a book I had not yet written. Once the book taught me what it was, the cover became almost easy.

Almost.

— Narcisse