If you’ve ever wondered what happens when three completely unrelated images meet in a dark alley and get duct-taped together in Photoshop with the smudge tool set to “vengeful,” feast your eyes on Still Burning by Abbi Glines. Because this cover isn’t just still burning — it’s going down in a slow-motion pixelated inferno.
Let’s start with the title. Still Burning implies heat, fire, and maybe a little edge. What we got instead was a murky sludge of reddish-brown filter slapped across a cover like expired barbecue sauce. Someone clearly thought “grunge = drama,” but instead of dramatic, we get blurry, bleary, and baffling. It’s like someone tried to summon emotional intensity and accidentally opened a portal to a gas station parking lot at dusk.
The cover is a Frankensteinian mashup of three distinct images that want absolutely nothing to do with one another. First, there’s a motorbike mysteriously levitating at the top like it’s reconsidering its role in the narrative. Then below it, we’re hit with what might be a road — or maybe a runway, or a countertop, or a JPEG artifact. It’s hard to tell because the entire bottom third of the cover looks like it went twelve rounds with a low-resolution compression algorithm.
But the pièce de résistance? The shadowy, barely-there torso lurking on the right-hand side like a ghost who photobombed the shoot by accident. It’s the visual equivalent of someone whispering “I’m here too” during a serious conversation and then backing slowly into the wallpaper. Who is she? Why is she glowing? And why does she appear to be fading into the motorcycle like she’s merging into a parallel timeline?
Typography doesn’t help this disaster either. The title is bold, but like everything else, it’s been dunked in grime and lit poorly. The author name is doing its best to pretend this cover doesn’t exist, hanging out down at the bottom in clean sans serif, trying not to make eye contact with the flaming pile above it.
In short, this cover is not burning with passion. It’s smoldering with regret. It’s less “dangerous romance” and more “Photoshop class final project turned in 10 minutes before the deadline.”
Still Burning? More like Still Blurring.