Hope Burned

From the synopsis of Brent Laporte’s haunting first novel: 

You sit down at the weathered harvest table to write a letter to your son. 

You need to explain the horrific events of the night, the circumstances that stained your hands with so much blood — the horrors that led you to take 

the lives of your own father and grandfather.

You journey back through darkness, deliberately, tentatively, to recover your own childhood. You compose your captivity, your torture, and the 

brutality of the men you’ve just killed. This was life on the farm: the strange and unspeakable things that went on.

And still, hope burned.

I used the combination of my own chicken scratch penmanship knocked out of a dark and dreary photo of the inside of my barn in all it’s creepy glory taken before its slow renovation began last year. I thought it important to use an actual ball point pen (not a brush or quill) to accurately depict the moment in time and mind. The type, although, harkens both the grown man and the childhood being remembered. I carried a hint of the “weathered harvest table” onto the book’s spine. Finally to bring at least a little light of hope to the cover a added a tiny silhouette of a hawk seen soaring in the blue sky above through a missing board in the barn’s hay loft.