The reindeer kept coming back.
I was generating the cover art, and every pass, the machine would slip a reindeer onto the rim. I would take it out, describe what I wanted again, and the next version would hand it back to me, a little larger, antlers up, standing there among the monsters like it had been invited.
I understood why. A reindeer is what the tool thinks Christmas is. Feed a machine every Christmas image ever made and ask it for a Christmas picture, and it will reach for the softest thing in the pile, because the soft version is the one that got printed ten million times. The reindeer is Santa’s animal. It is the sleigh, the snow, the wholesome part. And this is a book about everything the wholesome part was built to cover.
So the reindeer had to go, over and over, and getting it to stay gone turned out to be most of the work.
Here is what the cover is, so the rest makes sense. It is a medallion, a disc, and around its rim walks the whole company: Krampus with the basket of children on his back and his tongue out, the Yule Cat black and enormous, Grýla at her cooking pot, La Befana on her broom with her sack, the Tomte holding his bowl of porridge, the Mari Lwyd’s beribboned skull, the Gävle Goat made of straw and already on fire, the goblins clustered and grinning, a woman with a key, a woman with a knife. They face inward. They ring the disc like figures on a clock, or on a plate, or on a shield.
And the center, the thing they all surround, is empty. It is a still winter forest under a full moon. No creature in it. Just snow, and black trees, and the light coming back.
That is the argument of the entire book in one image, and I did not plan it that cleanly. It arrived while I was trying to fix the reindeer. The monsters are the rim. They are not the point. They are what stands around the quiet center and keeps watch over it. Take them away and you do not get more of the peaceful middle. You get a plate with nothing holding its edge.
The passes were mostly about who belonged on the rim and how much menace the disc could hold before it tipped into a Halloween prop.
One version came back on cream parchment, bright, in the style of an old illuminated manuscript, and it added a jester in bells and a mounted rider blowing a horn. It was, objectively, a nice picture. It was also busy and a little jolly, and jolly is the exact failure I was trying to avoid. Menace does not come from crowding the frame. It comes from restraint, from a few figures on a dark ground, given room. That version went in the bin.
The black ground won. On black, the gold rim reads like something dug up rather than something printed, and the figures stop being cute and start being present. That is the difference between a monster you laugh at and a monster you would not want at your door, and it is almost entirely a lighting decision.
Somewhere in the middle of all this the reindeer finally lost its spot, and what took its place was the Yule Cat. I want to note that swap because it is the whole book in one substitution. The reindeer is the animal that brings you gifts. The Yule Cat is the animal that eats you if your family did not finish the wool work. Same corner of the same disc. One is the Christmas we kept. The other is the Christmas we threw out. Putting the Cat where the reindeer wanted to be is not subtle, and I do not care.
The final disc got cropped into its circle by hand, in Canva, because the clean edge mattered and I was not going to leave it to chance. Then it went onto a deep red board, and the red is doing a specific job. Black cover, black medallion, and the thing looks like a horror novel. Red underneath, and it looks like Christmas that has something wrong with it, which is correct. The disc is dark. The book around it is a holiday. You are meant to feel the tension between those two things before you have read a word.
The back says “Before Santa, there were the others,” and then names a few of them, and ends with “Ye be warned,” which is also the first song on the album. The whole object is trying to tell you, at a glance, that this is Christmas with its teeth still in.
The reindeer never made it. I checked the final file three times to be sure.
The hardcover and paperback land October 1, and the medallion is worth seeing at full size. Until then, the Kindle carries the same cover, smaller, and is available now.
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