As Brian and I finish up the final read and polish of the manuscript of HELLHOLE AWAKENING (639 pages), we just received the remarkable cover sketch from Stephen Youll.  Steve has done many of our covers for years—most of the Dune novels, HELLHOLE, my three Star Wars anthologies, and BLINDFOLD. After working with our editor Pat LoBrutto, Brian and I suggested this scene to Steve, gave him the draft manuscript, and let him visualize it.

You can see why we keep going back to Steve. This really captures what we were looking for, the grim landscape of Hellhole, the epic scope, and the strange plant that symbolizes the planet’s “awakening.”  In the sketch, the plant looks too much like a normal Venus flytrap, so the plant will be modified, but this is the basic cover.

HELLHOLE AWAKENING is scheduled for February 2013 release.