You know a cover’s in trouble when your first reaction is, “What is this cat full of?” and your second is, “Oh no, it’s haunted.”
Let’s begin with the obvious: the title Tail of the Moon Ritual is already hanging on by a whisker. It sounds like an overambitious anime episode. But the real magic trick here is how the designer managed to fuse three completely unrelated vibes into one deeply confusing visual casserole.
The centerpiece is a black cat—standard issue for paranormal cozies—but then they went full “cut-and-paste séance” and filled its entire body with a horror scene from a different genre. Inside the cat: a red-tinged graveyard under a blood moon. Outside the cat: an orange sherbet background that’s trying very hard to say “fun witchy mystery” but ends up screaming “graphic design is my passion.”
The layering job on this cat-internal graveyard is a tragic tale in and of itself. Lighting? None. Blending? Zero. The moon is glowing with all the subtlety of a flashlight in a dryer. The tombstones just float in there, confused and uninvited, like interns at a goth fashion show. It’s as if someone tried to Photoshop a séance inside a Halloween decoration and then just stopped caring halfway through.
And the font—oh, the font. “RITUAL” is spelled out in huge, bold letters, like it’s an occult thriller, while “A Wonder Cats Mystery” tiptoes along underneath as if it knows it doesn’t belong. The author’s name in delicate serif gold tries to lend a bit of class to the proceedings, but by then it’s too late—the cat is full of ghosts and we’ve all accepted our fate.
Is it a cozy mystery? A satanic panic in feline form? A Hallmark horror special? We may never know.
What we do know is this: if you’re going to stuff a graveyard into a cat silhouette, maybe—just maybe—run it past a designer first. Or a cat. Or literally anyone with functioning eyeballs.
Final diagnosis: this isn’t a mystery—this is a cat-astrophic design ritual gone terribly wrong.