Title: This Way for Hell
Author: Spike Morelli
Cover artist: Reginald Heade
Yours for: $30
Best things about this cover:
- That woman died from a severe case of Volcano Nipple, and the jogging mermaid hitwoman couldn't care less.
- "If I can't be Miss Sea Foam 1952, no one can! Taxi!"
- "This way for hell, that way for linens, sundries, and men's wear."
- Love her right earring, which is trying desperately to swim away from her face (I assume that's a fish, given the nautical hue of her gown and (prodigious) gloves).
Best things about this back cover:
- Wow. Kids, see that second sentence? Don't write like that. Just make "completely merciless" into an adjectival phrase and put it before "syndicate."
- "Even Venus de Milo"??? That armless statue? That's your paragon of shamelessness? Never thought of her as a slutty exhibitionist.
- Seriously, this was written by an eighth-grader. You will go to a limit. You won't go beyond it. Come on!
- Uh, it's This Way FOR Hell, not TO Hell. Stupid eighth-grader.
Page 123~
"You could still go for me if you wanted to let yourself go. You know you could."
"You're all mixed up inside, Julie. There could never be any room in my life for a dame like you."
"You make it hard, Shaun. I don't know what to do."
"When dames get tough they usually do silly things. Things they live to regret afterwards."
This dame doesn't "live to regret" her behavior so much as (on the very next page) fling herself through a window to her splattery death in the alley below. Sorry. I should have said "SPOILER ALERT!"
Also, pretty sure the eighth-grader who wrote the cover copy wrote the whole damn book as well. The entire dialogue between dick and dame is hilarious, wooden, C-grade patter.
~RP
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