The Pale Light of Sunset

Today, I started doing something totally new at the Press. I was handed a manuscript of a new book titled The Pale Light of Sunset and was told to read part of it and think about what kind of "vibe" it put out. Then, I was told to go on Amazon.com to find book covers that put out a similar vibe to come up with ideas for a cover to the book. I read a little less than half of the manuscript and then started browsing Amazon, still glancing at the text every now and then.
At first, I thought about looking up books on Hitler, which is morbid, but the content of the book is sometimes rather violent, so it fit. Furthermore, there is a part of the book where the main character is outside of a pharmacy during World War II. There is a large poster of Adolf Hitler that people are supposed to put their ciggarettes out on, but the main character doesn't know who he is. I found this to be a profound image and thought it would be interesting, yet controversial to use for a cover.
As I continued to glance over the text, I came up with a few other ideas, most involving either the Hitler image or the American flag and drugs. I say drugs because the book is supposed to be based on hallucinations. The more I read of the text, the more I realized Lee Maynard, the author, writes very similarly to my favorite author, Brett Easton Ellis. This prompted me to look up the cover of the book called Less Than Zero. This book features a hazy picture of the city of LA fading up into white with the title in embossed lettering. I thought since the two author's writing styles were similar, perhaps we could incorporate a similar feel to Maynard's work.
There is a reoccurring theme in the book where the main character always falls down when he hears a gun shot, either hunting with his father or when he sees someone killed in a bar fight. He always falls down. This made me think of perhaps combining the faded, hazy effect on Less Than Zero to Sunset. I thought it would be cool and equally trippy and colorful, to feature a graphic of a shadow or sillouette of a person falling from one corner of the book cover due to a gun "blast" graphic. The person falling could slowly fade into white with some sort of trippy lettering for the title and author lines. I want to keep the trippy, colorful themes not only because they are fun, but because they are totally different from Maynard's other two book covers and I think that is what Than is shooting for. After I came up with all of these ideas, I communicated them to Than, who seemed open to them. He then instructed me to start looking for images on flikr.com of people falling or shadows of falling people. I gathered as many as possible before I left the office with the Grab tool and sent them, with a memo of all of my ideas to Than for him to go over.