A Book By Its Cover: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Picture yourself on a boat or a lakeshore, with pastel balloons and ominous skies; Some monster calls you, you answer quite slowly — the girl with the GLOWING RED EYES! My Best Friend’s Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix, is a work of art. You can tell just by looking at the cover. There is a LOT going on here! It tells a story all by itself, but go on and read the book, too. I can’t promise you’ll be glad you did, since I don’t know you, Gentle Reader, but I’d be amazed if you’re not interested! The first thing to notice — well, no, the first thing I noticed was the girl with the glowing red eyes, but I’ll get back to her in a bit. The first thing to talk about is the cognitive dissonance introduced by the cover. It has a yellow smiley “BE KIND, REWIND” sticker at the top right. (The Young Adult audience of today won’t remember this, but there used to be things called videotapes, sort of like DVDs, but once you watched them, the next viewers couldn’t watch until rewinding to the beginning. But I digress.) Just below and to the left, there’s a green “A NOVEL” sticker. Then at the bottom, it says VHS, which refers to the most common, if not the best, format of videotape. This book/movie disparity is explained by the fact that the story is about the filming of a direct-to-video flick that never even got released, because things went horribly awry during the location shots.
