Design a captivating cover for a suspense story set in a desert island

Nadie vendrá a rescatarnos

G. G. Velasco

Writer, journalist and traveller.

Book is a psychological suspense story, with some slight romance, about a man with a brain tumor (that causes him to see vivid hallucinations) trapped in a lost Pacific island after a plane crash, and his conflictive relationship with the only other survivor: a young amnesic woman under psychiatric treatment that has lost his medications after the crash and falls in love with him. None of them is 100% sure that the other one is real. Here is a translation of the synopsis: Famous surgeon and teacher Oliver Eldricht decides to leave everything behind after his wife´s death, but his desperate plan to run away changes dramatically when a crash leaves him stranded in a lost Pacific island. Remorseful by his his cowardice, Oliver decides to fight for survival in order to return home as soon as possible and correct his mistake, but his encounter with another mysterious survivor, whose mental health does not seem too stable, threatens his plans and his own sanity in unsuspected ways. With only two characters and a location, the novel builds up a peculiar psychological and survival intrigue, tinged with melancholy and romanticism, about the deepest meaning of loss. To sum it up: Nadie vendrá a rescatarnos = Misery + Cast Away + Shutter Island. Tone is more gloomy, dreamlike and melancholic than purely thriller-like, in the style of movies such of The sixth sense or The village.

Men and women from 20 to 60 years old, but especially women.

Paperback

I am looking for something atmospheric, evocative and eye-catching involving the following concepts: 1. Isolation and confinement (Two persons trapped in a Pacific Island). Note: the island is volcanic in origin, with two small beaches, big steep rocks on the shore, some promontories and almost no vegetation except for cactuses, some dry glass and bursera trees. Main character builds a shelter with plane debris in the beach and creates an S.O.S giant legend visible from the air just beside it. On top of a steep rock, he also installs a triangle of red flags. 2. Mental instability/fragmentation /dreamlike atmosphere (as stated before, one of the characters suffers DELUSIONS and the other is amnesic has been deprived from her medications, a situation that creates a weird scenario full of doubts and uncertainties between them since none knows for sure if the other is real). 3. Distrust. 4. Twisted romance (despite all, they develop a love relationship during their stay in the island, even though conflictive and tortuous). 5. Suspense. Motifs you MAY use: 1. Striped Iguana: there is one in the island that the main character tries to hunt several times with no success at all. It becomes a symbol by the end of the story, and is always around staring at the main character to remember him his guilt. 2. Origami figures: main character´s hobby. He creates paper figures to remember his son, which he misses a lot after abandoning him back home. Iguanas are the child's favorite´s figures. 3. Blood: there is a key scene in which the ocean turns into blood during a delusion. I particularly like the aerial image of an island surrounded by a red quiet sea. Also, the iguana from 1 ends up watching the main character agonize in a boat deck at the third act, while standing in the middle of a puddle of blood. 4. Blood-stained spear: main character uses this tool to defend himself from the other survivor. It is just a stick with a small scalpel attached to it. 5. Skeletons of two WWII Japanese soldiers (main character discovers an old bunker in the second half of the story and finds them inside in hara-kiri position). 6. Flight recorder: Main character finds it floating in the shore and desperately tries to open it. 7. Cancer/tumor/CT-Scan/Radiographies: main character´s wife died from a brain tumor similar to his own. He is traumatized by that and some of the delusions he sees are closely related to that trauma: scan lines floating in the air, CT-Scans numbers on top of rocks, radiography textures... By the end of the book, he discovers as well that the island has exactly the same shape of the tumor that killed his wife, a powerful image that may be of use for the cover. 8. Storm: one brings down the plane, and another one destroys the beach settlement, forcing the survivors to start again from the beginning. 9. Whisky bottles: main character has his issues with alcohol. After finding two bottles of whisky in a suitcase and getting drunk, he breaks one of them and attempts to commit suicide by cutting his veins with a fragment of crystal. 10. Hallucinations: main character has several along the story and all of them have deep meaning for the story. Those following are the most important: 10.1. Centipede: he first see a centipede emerging from his own eyeball and then another one from his companion ear. It is a creepy way to depict how obsessed he is with his wife's death and the idea that she is rotting in a cemetery. 10.2. Zombies: during the storm, he sees the corpses of many of the plane crash victims emerging from the sand pit where they were buried and trying to kill him. There are also centipedes on their rotten corpses. One of them around the finger of one particular zombi (his flight partner, to whom he stole a cell phone) pointing at him in a guilty manner 10.3. Pieces of the falling plane emerging from the water where it crashed and reassembling in the sky like in a 3d scan. 10.4. Inside the black box he also finds some old imaginary pictures of himself and the other survivor (instead of his dead wife) posing with his son. 11. Wild birds: island is full of them. They are violent and fight the main character a couple of times. At the beginning, they also feed from dead corpses, having a preference for their eyes. 12. Maps, coordenates, navigation charts... Anything that may help to reinforce the idea of the island being in the middle of nowhere. 13. Dices: «God doesn't play dice» is a recurring line throughout the story. 14. Cigarettes: both survivors use them to build fragile towers in the sand and play a jenga-style game with them, which is a metaphor of the fragility of their own relationship. Note: all of the above are just random ideas. And some of them not even good ones. You don't have to use them mandatorily. I just wanted to give you some elements to inspire you, but if you can come up with something fresher and original I will be more than happy to see it. :)

Most important thing for this particular cover is to achieve a high level of quality. I want the book to have a professional looking but at the same time to have an unique style. So, please avoid: -Cheap designs or designs that look amateur or unprofessional. -Generic stock images. -Sloppy or inharmonic composition (I pay especial attention to the balance between font and images) -Cheesy or barroque fonts It is also important to avoid palm trees. Island is more rocky and wild than purely paradisiac. On the other hand, I don´t usually like to include character´s faces on my covers. This doesn´t mean that you can´t include something like that in your designs, but I tend to prefer figures viewed from behind, silhouettes or other more subtle an suggestive solutions, like aerial shots.