Jessica Pellow

Maya Culpa

Tears I Can’t Hold In

Trisha McMillan is 11 years old, left handed, in love with a boy at school, and moving to rural Ontario on December 1. California natives, her family is moving there so her father can work but aside from cultural, geographic and meteorological, she’s also going through some changes of her own. Those changes, the crying tree she discovers behind her house, and the boy the tree belongs to will lead her down a path to home.

Taming the Wildest of Hearts

Trophies

Karla Williams has been hunting since she got her first license at the age of 16. A careful, patient and calculated hunter, she’s gained renown for her marksmanship, often at times seen as in direct opposition to her beauty or gender. Karla’s fiancee, Bill Taylor, is a business man from upstate New York who’s penchant for poaching and dismantling companies for profit has landed him in the 30 under 30 for the last 2 years. When Bill disappears 6 days before their wedding leaving a cryptic message in his wake, Karla will take on big game in the ultimate blood sport. 

This cover is one in which I wanted to play with photography and natural framing. In this shot, I liked the idea of the look of wet / fresh blood in the title as well as the hint of a smear / sharp spear in the letter “t”. I used a buck as opposed to a doe not just for the natural framing from the antlers but also because of the parallels between a male target. The buck doesn’t look afraid but they are captured by the frame. The title “Trophies” is meant to be a triple play. Trophy in the sense of the medals Karla has won as well as the concept of trophy wife in addition to the final meaning: the small tokens that hunters take from their kills. 

Grasp

In 1998, 8 year old Claire Farmer disappeared from her parent's backyard at 2 in the afternoon and was found unconscious in a small pond 5 miles away and a day later with no memory of how she had gotten there. 15 years later, Claire is an medical intern at Grace West Hospital where she meets a young man with focal hand dystonia, a condition causing the involuntarily clenching of the hands, as the result of unknown physical trauma. His name and origin are unknown and he doesn't know them either, but he does know Claire and how she got the scar on the back of her neck...he just needs to remember.

Calm

Janice Tran is missing a year of her life. A year of her life that doctors have told her she’ll never regain. The accident stole it and damaged the part of her brain that retains the memory. It may come back, in time. But what she has kept is a sense of foreboding. There’s something she needs to remember. Something that wakes her up in the middle of the night and makes her catch her breath in quiet moments by herself. But what is it, and why is it the one thing she’s been able to hang on to?

By Jessica Pellow

We Need to Talk

I didn’t hear her response so much as felt it. I’d asked her the same question a hundred times with no response but tonight was different. Tonight I got the sense she could hear me and was desperately trying to respond. For the first time in 7 years, I knew she could hear me...and that she had something to say. Now I just had to figure out how to let her say it. 

Alice in Underland

What if Alice never fell down the rabbit hole? What if Alice fell, hit her head, and landed not in Wonderland, but in a coma? Afraid, alone, and unsure of what is real and what is just her mind playing tricks on her, Alice Carroll will have to chase the white rabbit down ever darker holes in order to find her way out. 

ID & EGO

A two part series exploring what it means to become a superhero in the modern age. 

ID begins with Jennifer Lilly, an electrical engineering student with an unbelievable power growing just beneath the surface of her skin without her knowledge. When her power begins to manifest, she’ll discover that having powers and being to control them are two very different things. Her new found power will put her at odds with her family, her friends and even herself. Unpredictable but not uncontrollable, the future holds many surprises. 

EGO picks up immediately after ID and explores the aftermath. A revealed paramilitary organization, a devastated team, a recently discovered body and a disembodied consciousness. There’s a lot to be done, and not a lot of time to do it. 

With these covers I want to show an evolution of the self. With the first, the colors are muted, the points of connected are varied and uneven. There’s a feeling of chaos; peaks and valleys. As the character evolves and they come into their own, embracing the power and simultaneously the responsibility, the points are less uneven. There is still some unpredictability but there’s a feeling of containment. Simultaneously, the strengthening of color is meant to show courage, femininity, womanhood and a strong sense of self as Jennifer embraces this aspect of her person and it becomes part of her identity.

Haunted

Maya and Meryl live deep in the Appalachian Mountains, as far from mankind and their memories as they can get. Haunted by violence and pain, the two have run from the only life they’ve ever known and will do whatever it takes to stay there. Pursued by the ghosts of their past life, they have two choices: retreat deep into the woods that have harbored them for 14 year or stand and fight. 

For this cover, i wanted to play off the idea of “living in the shadows”. The idea that there are places where the light never really touches, where people are kept in the dark both by their circumstances and by their choices. Simultaneously, there’s a feeling that the sun is rising. That any moment the light will touch and reveal each hill and valley. That hope seems diametrically opposed to the title but is meant to show the tug back and forth between fear and hope, dark and light. 

Toil & Trouble

Seline and Selma are identical twins. So are Marcus and Max. The duos have never met each other until tonight. Tonight, Selma and Max will meet on a blind date, sparks will fly, and they will both disappear without a trace leaving panic in their wake. Seline and Marcus will find themselves unlikely partners in the race to find their other halves. Double double, toil and trouble indeed!

I liked the idea of simplicity and playing off of some of the more graphic mystery novels like Janet Evanovich. There are two types of knots shown here, each requiring two lengths of rope. In order for these types of knots to work, the ropes must be of similar diameter and weight and material. I’ve left the interpretation open as to whether the knots represent in pairings. The black is intended to be similar to a jeweler’s velvet, showing off the knots as if they are precious.

Any Happy Little Thought

Finn and Theodore, orphans at the Home for Abandoned Children, have always been a little strange. Inseparable, indistinguishable. Perhaps it’s because they share everything; their clothes, their feelings, even their dreams. This will all change however for the young 11 year olds when Finn falls into a coma. Theodore will venture inside the mind of his young friend, discovering things he never knew and facing a foe that neither can face alone but that they may just be able to defeat together. 

A unique opponent, an even more unique adventure. 

The Many Faces of My Mother

What Amy Holt knows about her mother she knows from the handful of pictures, videotapes, letters and memories passed on to her. An old friend of her mother’s turns up with a collection of her diaries documenting the 10 years before Amy was born and the five years they had together, as well each psychotic episode since her diagnosis. Each entry providing a new facet of a woman she hardly knew, Amy and her mother’s diaries embark on an exploration of the soul unlike any other. 

I love the idea of exploring imperfection in parents, not a “sins of the father” concept, but the veil that we pull over our memories. We trust our parents even more than ourselves and as a result, chaotic memories can become smoothed over with time as our childish brains trust that there is a path, a reason, a purpose. We’re unable to know our parents as children but as we age we begin to see the parallels as we finally reach the age our parents were when we were born and with it comes the scary realization of how similar, and how different, we have become. The colors are an obvious visual tie to emotions, to personality traits and recognizable as signs of a scattered mind while also meant to hint at the idea of phrenology and the concept of an imperfect science. The blank background with clear borders means to show the isolation and loneliness, the idea of what lies beneath the surface inside someone’s ind that we can never know. 

Mountain

Claire Richards has been visually impaired since she was 3. Raised by her two adventure seeking older brothers after the death of their parents, Claire has grown up confident, independent and self sufficient never letting her impairment hold her back. When both brothers disappear during a weekend hike on Grise Mountain, it’s up to Claire to find them and bring them home. 

I’ll be honest, I went a bit literal with this one. I wanted to really reflect the reality of someone with a visual impairment on a mountain side, the only clarity being the color of the sky and the darkness of the soil beneath Claire’s feet. The text is meant to provide an homage to an eye chart while also naming the challenge as the barrier to entry. This mountain stands  between Claire and her goal, between Claire and her way forward.

Chili

Petra's mother told her that the day she made the perfect chili, she would meet her husband. Now Petra has an award winning chili cookbook, successful culinary TV show and still no husband. But things are about to get spicy both in and out of the kitchen because the chef across the street has just stolen her chili crown with a secret ingredient she can’t quite figure out.

My favourite part of this is the splat. Second is the large C that looks like a sticky finger drew it on a counter top. I liked the idea of a while cover “ruined” by a messy sudge of chili sauce. A little dash of chaos, just what Petra needs in the “perfect” life that she curated. 

My Imaginary Best Friend

Tom Linkletter is sure of three things: He has schizophrenia, his favorite color is every shade of blue and his best friend, Adam Hock, is a hallucination. The only problem is, Adam isn't a hallucination. Adam is real and Tom is going to really need his help. After all, it isn’t every day a journalism post-grad takes on a white collar crime syndicate. 

I used to wonder when i entered university if I was developing mental illness. The sleep deprivation, the emotional highs and tumultuous lows somtimes made me feel like I was losing my mind and I knew that mental illness often presents in those in their early twenties. My mother, a social worker, assured me I was showing nothing resembling it, but when I was about 18 I watched a Beautiful Mind and I wondered if it was possible that any of my friends weren’t real. Many of my friendships were with people from different groups and so they never interacted. I liked the idea of paper dolls and the fragile connections that they have together. They are seemingly identical but every so often one comes out with skinny arms or an oddly shaped head and i liked the idea of playing with imperfection amidst a seemingly perfect set. 

The Ghosts of Tilly Cove