I’ve been binging book covers lately. From comic books, childhood favourites, classic novels, you name it. I’m picky with them. Fussy, actually. Covers matter. A lot. They’re the poster for the movie you haven’t seen yet. The bait. The “Do I want to see more” moment.
It reminds me of the video store days, standing there, turning over VHS covers to read the blurb, totally hypnotised by the poster art. Turning the cover over and reading what the movie is about. That feeling stuck with me.
I’ve done comic book covers in a previous post, but this time I felt like making book covers. I wasn’t aiming for accuracy. I was just in the mood to make covers that looked cool.
The only problem I had is that there are just too many styles I would have loved to explore. So decided to stick to 1 theme for a collection. That’s where the “Monsters” idea came in.
Batch One: The Monster Collection
For the first batch, I chose classic monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy, The Wolfman and The Bride (of Frankenstein).
Now usually, these covers show the character front and center, clear as daylight. But that sort of ruins the fun. Monsters are scarier when you don’t see all of them. So I flipped it—literally.
Each monster is shown from behind. Not in silhouette, but fully rendered, detailed, and textured. You can see enough to know who (or what) they are, but there’s still mystery. Their posture, environment, and design do the storytelling, leaving room for the imagination to do the rest.
I also wrote short synopses for each one. As if I were rewriting the original stories, giving them alternate takes or subtle twists.
The visual style across all six is unified: each monster is part of the same cinematic, creepy universe. They’re different stories, but they belong together. Like horror collector’s editions.
DRACULA: They say Dracula is a legend—a whisper on the Carpathian wind, a tale to keep children from wandering the woods at night. But legends do not send letters.
Jonathan Harker is summoned to Transylvania under the guise of legal business, tasked with arranging property sales for the enigmatic Count Dracula. Yet, from the moment he steps into Castle Dracula, he feels something gnawing at his mind… something watching him, something testing him.
Because Harker is not the first to receive such an invitation. He is merely the first to last this long.
Dracula is rotting from the inside. Blood no longer sustains him as it once did. But there is another way—an ancient rite, older than the first vampire, buried in the bones of the world itself. A ritual that requires something stronger than stolen blood.
It requires a willing sacrifice.
Now, trapped in the castle, Harker must navigate a web of illusions, false kindness, and impossible choices. Because Dracula does not wish to kill him. Dracula wishes to become him.
THE MUMMY: The desert does not forget.
Professor Julian Ashford knows this better than most. As a historian of lost civilizations, he has spent his life unearthing secrets that should have stayed buried. But nothing could have prepared him for what lay beneath the dunes of Dahshur—a hidden tomb, untouched for thousands of years, containing a sarcophagus with no name and no seals.
A coffin meant not to honor the dead… but to contain it.
When the mummy is disturbed, strange things begin to happen. The excavation team vanishes one by one, their bodies found days later, withered and twisted, their flesh blackened as if burned from within. In the heart of Cairo, whispers spread of The Hungerer, a god-king who ruled not with armies, but with an appetite. A ruler whose dominion was not land, but living flesh.
Now, as Julian pieces together the truth, he comes to a horrifying realization. The mummy buried beneath Dahshur was not a pharaoh. It was not a man. It was something much older. And it was never supposed to wake up.
But it has. And it is hungry.
THE WOLFMAN: In the dead of winter, in the forests of Wales, the Talbot family has long carried a curse. But when Lawrence Talbot returns home after years abroad, he is shocked to find that his father is not the broken old man he expected—but a man in his prime, stronger, sharper… ageless.
That is when he sees it: the hunting trophies lining the great hall are not of deer or bears, but of men.
The Talbot estate has never suffered a werewolf’s curse—it has mastered it. For generations, the family has wielded their condition as a gift, hunting those deemed unworthy to survive, their secret cult spanning the upper echelons of Victorian society. Now, as Lawrence’s own transformation looms, he is given a choice: embrace his lineage and claim his place among the Devourers… or be hunted like the rest.
But as the full moon rises, he discovers a far more horrifying truth—somewhere out there, something older, something hungrier, is hunting them.
THE CREATURE OF THE BLACK LAGOON: The jungle was never quiet. But now, it mourns.
Decades ago, a man vanished in the Amazon basin. A biologist, compassionate and curious, searching for undiscovered species in waters older than time. His name is forgotten. His body was never found. But something else emerged. Something that remembers love, and breathes through gills.
They call it the Creature—a god to some, a ghost to others. It watches from beneath lily-choked waters, not out of hunger… but longing.
When Dr. Ana Cordero arrives to study environmental collapse in the region, she finds not just dying rivers and silent forests, but signs of intelligence in the murk. Carvings. Patterns. Warnings. And a presence. Something that moves with the rhythm of the rainforest. Something old. Something… gentle.
But the world does not leave its monsters in peace. Poachers, oil barons, and men with guns descend to claim the last wild places for profit.
And when blood spills into the lagoon, the silence ends.
Because the Creature remembers being a man. And he remembers what they took from him.
FRANKENSTEIN: The monster was supposed to have died.
Years have passed since Victor Frankenstein met his end in the Arctic wasteland, and Captain Robert Walton, the man who bore witness to his madness, has spent his days trying to forget. He thought the creature had perished in the cold, vanishing into the ice like a ghost of some forgotten sin.
But now, deep in the mountains of Bavaria, there are rumors.
Tales of something monstrous stalking the forests, its body stitched together like a ragdoll, its flesh refusing to decay. The villagers whisper of graveyards defiled, of corpses disappearing from their tombs, of a creature desperately trying to make something—someone—whole.
Against his better judgment, Walton embarks on one last journey to uncover the truth. But what he finds is not a mindless beast. What he finds is something far more terrifying—an identity.
Because the creature has discovered something new: a name.
A name that belongs to one of the bodies it was made from. A name that carries memories of a life stolen. And it wants that life back.
THE BRIDE: She did not ask to be reborn.
She remembers the scalpel slicing through dead flesh. She remembers the smell of formaldehyde, the pull of the needle and thread as she was stitched together like a quilt of stolen skin. But most of all, she remembers his voice—Victor Frankenstein’s voice—telling her that she belonged to someone else. That she was made for someone else.
She does not remember who she was before.
The world calls her a monster. But she knows the truth. She is not the monster. She is the ghost.
And ghosts do not forget.
Now, she wanders the world, hunted by those who would finish what Frankenstein started. But there are whispers—whispers of a man in Vienna who claims to know her name. A man who claims to have loved her, long before she became this thing of stitched skin and lost memories.
Could it be true? Could she have once been someone… whole?
As she follows the trail of a life she may have once lived, she begins to wonder: if she finds the person she used to be… will she even want to be her again?
Or has she become something else entirely?
Batch Two: Redesigns of Popular Stories
Then there’s the second batch. Less themed, more whatever-I-feel-like of some. It’s all a creative itch. No deadlines, no clients, just the joy of visual storytelling for stories that already have a place in my head.
If you ever judged a book by its cover. You’re not wrong. That’s exactly the point.
About the Author
