Jackets Required: The King of Methlehem

By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 5/27/2008 12:24:00 PM

This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com. 

Title: The King of Methlehem
Designer: Rodrigo Corral
Author: Mark Lindquist
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 

Meth functions remarkably well as the official drug of the Y2K decade. Consider the defining characteristics of contemporary American society: hyper-informed, hyper-connected, hyper-kinetic and Just Plain Hyper. It’s an era where any mood is just a drug away, and ADHD is a survival skill.

The odd thing about the use of meth in storytelling, however, is that there’s nothing glamorous about it. Cocaine was glamorous and heroin was rock & roll, but meth is a bunch of twitchy kids in a trailer picking scabs. So we find it a little interesting that authors and filmmakers are able to successfully exploit it in popular fiction.

The King of Methlehem is a police detective whose pursuit of a meth dealer turns into an obsession which ultimately unravels his personal life, represented on the cover by a look into a domestic living space through a drug-busted wall. We initially thought that we were looking at multiple printed panels through a die cut front cover, but nope, just good printing and a stellar photograph.