With her very first paperback cover illustration - for Isobel (below, Jove Books, 1977) - artist Rowena Morrill showed an innate talent for depicting the lurid, the fantastical, the unimaginable, with bold eye-catching color and strikingly detailed monsters, heroines, wizards, and other genre-specific characters. Morrill rose to prominence throughout the late 1970s and onward, one of the few female artists to contribute greatly to the SF&F/horror paperback boom. Her cover art is unmistakably of its time, original and painstaking work readers don't often see today - which makes it so wondrously special and worth celebrating. At top is Burning (Jove, May 1978), and it is easily one of my top 10 paperback horror covers: I love the blood-red title, the terrified women screaming, the house ablaze, all within a half-cube. And add that tagline - "A love that defied the grave"! Man I can't resist. Maybe one day I'll read it! These two collections of Lovecraft, both Jove 1978, were some of her earliest work, and I must say that besides the famous Michael Whelan covers for Ballantine/Del Rey a few years later, they're simply the best HPL paperback covers. The orange and blue text, sure, but the bizarre creatures could only be painted by an artist who actually read the stories. Same goes for that Frank Belknap Long collection, as it depicts the title tale in all its muck and madness. It wasn't till just the other day that I came across this Charles L. Grant title, Night Songs (Pocket, June 1984), and it got me started really looking for Morrill covers I hadn't seen before. Haven't read it but I'm gonna assume there's a mermaid involved.... Most of Morrill's covers were for the science fiction and fantasy genres, but we know how that line can blur. Below are just a few examples of her Timescape covers, a 1980s imprint of Pocket Books. Have you read George R.R. Martin's 1979 novella "Sandkings"? Holy shit, it truly is one of the great horror/SF tales of the '80s! The cover is perfect. And of course we all love our Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, even though personally I have no time for reading about wizards or muscular shirtless heroes. Perhaps Morrill's most iconic horror paintings were done for Pocket's Robert R. McCammon line. I can't imagine '80s horror without this imagery and vanishing point perspective. Swan Song (June 1987) is a staple of the era, and They Thirst (Oct 1988) is a particular fave cover of mine, Hollywood vampires oh yeah! Another stunner is this motley crew of bloodthirsty night creatures, folks whose faces we all recognize. Wish I'd seen this when I was a kid, it's from '78 also and I would've killed for it. I was crazy for monsters in castles back then, just crazy. And then there's The Haunt (Popular Library, April 1990), another book I'd never heard of till researching Morrill's covers. She loves her bats! So much thanks to you, Ms. Morrill, for some of my favorite horror paperback covers ever. The artist herself, c. 1970s one presumes
