There’s haunted, and then there’s Haunted — a cover so visually cursed that it looks like the spirit world tried to make its own digital self-portrait and ran out of both art supplies and emotional bandwidth halfway through. This isn’t so much a book cover as it is an apparition with a graphic tablet.
Let’s start with our main subject, a woman with a mane of fire-red hair and the thousand-yard stare of someone who’s just realized she’s trapped in a painting that never got a second draft. Her skin tone is somewhere between “Victorian ghost” and “candle wax,” and her eyes are fixed on you like she’s silently begging for someone to fix her lighting. The hair — oh, the hair — flows rigidly, like it’s made of copper wire, defying wind, gravity, and probably the laws of good composition.
Behind her floats the great cosmic mystery of the piece: a giant abstract orb. It could be an eye. It could be the moon. It could be an interdimensional pastry. Whatever it is, it dominates the scene with the energy of a middle-school art project titled “Symbolism, I Guess.” The painterly strokes around it bleed into a dark void that seems to whisper, “We didn’t have time to finish the background.”
Then there’s the color palette — a gothic rainbow of deep blues, bruised purples, and frantic whites. It’s like someone spilled ink in an art classroom and decided to call it a séance. The brushwork wavers between expressive and uncertain, as if the artist was halfway between inspiration and an emotional breakdown.
And let’s not ignore the typography, that unsung villain of so many covers. The word HAUNTED sits stark and awkward above the chaos, rendered in a stiff serif font that might have once belonged to a church bulletin. It’s legible, sure, but about as spooky as an invitation to a bake sale. Then, below, comes Maria Savva in cheery yellow cursive — bright, bubbly, and completely tonally divorced from the grim mood around it. It’s as if someone thought, “You know what this paranormal tragedy needs? A pop of lemon.”
Compositionally, everything feels just a little off-center — not enough to be avant-garde, just enough to be unsettling. The woman’s placement suggests she’s being slowly absorbed by the eye-moon hybrid, while the empty right side of the cover feels like a canvas that simply gave up. The more you look at it, the more you start to believe the title — the cover itself is haunted, possessed by every art-school critique that ever ended in tears.
Yet, for all its flaws, Haunted has an undeniable charm. There’s earnestness here — the ghost of genuine effort. You can tell someone meant for this to be moving, mysterious, perhaps even a little romantic. Instead, it’s unsettling, ambiguous, and oddly funny — like a séance gone wrong in a high school art class.
It’s bad, yes, but it’s memorably bad. The kind of bad that lingers. You might forget a dozen sleek, corporate thrillers with their polished type and moody stock photos, but this? This will stay with you. You’ll remember the red hair, the melted moon, the lemon-yellow signature beaming out of the abyss.
Haunted doesn’t just depict haunting — it is one. A restless spirit of art direction doomed to wander the bookstore forever, whispering, “Maybe we should’ve hired a designer.”