If you’ve been watching Debutiful’s social media recently, you may have already spotted the cover for Mayra in a recent summer book mail hype post. If you haven’t, get ready to be blown away.
Mayra by Nicky Gonzalez is a modern, gothic horror set in the swampland of Florida. Gonzalez, who hails from Hialeah, Florida, introduces readers to two estranged friends who reunite in a house in the Everglades. What follows is an unsettling and propulsive journey into the madness of friendship all while being haunted by their very surroundings.
Set to release on July 22, the book is available for pre-order. You can read stories and previous work by Gonzalez that has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, BOMB Magazine, Kenyon Review Online, and Taco Bell Quarterly, among others, on her website.
Debutiful is pleased to reveal the cover, designed by Andreea Dumuta, of Gonzalez’s debut alongside a Q&A with the writer to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the cover came to be.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
Absolutely. I had an album on my phone that served as a cover mood board—lots of black and red and green, lots of isolated houses and tangled flora. There were also a few mass market paperback covers for gothic novels and a few vintage posters for Italian horror movies in there. I also made a trip to the bookstore specifically to browse the new fiction table and note which covers caught my eye. The throughline in most the images was a limited color palette, either monochromatic or working with three colors max. I love the way certain color combinations make book covers pop, and I wanted that for the cover of Mayra. I also felt early on that the cover shouldn’t feature a face or even a human figure.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I had a meeting with my editor to talk about my hopes and dreams for the cover. In that meeting I was like “Can I share my screen? I have…a document,” and proceeded to scroll through a bullet pointed list complete with examples. The first bullet point simply said “BIG SEXY GOTHIC FONT” (think Marina Yuszczuk’s Thirst or John Darnielle’s Devil House) and as you can see, I got my wish. I also shared some art from my cover mood board. One image was a surreal piece by Andreea Dumuta of a glowing doorway in a dark wood. I’d bookmarked it a couple of years ago and kept returning to it and thinking “that’s my book” so I was thrilled when the design team suggested working with Andreea on an Everglades version of it for the cover. There were two other cover options that were gorgeous, featuring a different big sexy gothic font that I still think about. It hurt to let them go, but the doorway was irresistible.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I was absolutely giddy. The image, the font, the way the light interacts with the text. I could hear and smell the forest. It was so cool. I desperately wanted to show it off. I was in a hospital room waiting for my husband to fully wake up after a surgery when I received the email. I’d say he was about 20% awake, but I showed him anyway. He (maybe sleep talking) said it was amazing, then immediately went back to sleep. I remember sitting there thinking, “This is the best book cover of all time and it’s somehow for my book.”
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The setting is very much a character in the book and the forest in this illustration is so evocative of the hardwood hammock habitat you’ll find in the Everglades—there’s the live oak stretching across the image, Spanish moss, thatch palms. It’s lush and overgrown, beautiful but a little scary.
Mayra, the object of the narrator Ingrid’s obsession, can be casually cruel, difficult to please, and thrill-seeking to her own detriment, but Ingrid finds her irresistible. I think the doorway holds a similar appeal. There’s the possibility of danger, sure, but it’s also hypnotic and inviting. It preempts the classic question we ask of horror plots: Why would so and so go into that basement/forest/clearly haunted house? Well, because it’s beautiful. Also, if you look at the horizon, it’s twilight. Time is a little wobbly in the novel, so I love that the cover makes me wonder if the sun is setting or rising. I could go on. The more I look at it, the more I realize how perfect the cover is for Mayra.