Friday Face-Off: Psychedelic
Welcome to The Friday Face-Off, a weekly meme created by Books by Proxy! Each Friday, we will pit cover against cover while also taking the opportunity to showcase gorgeous artwork and feature some of our favorite book covers. If you want to join the fun, simply choose a book each Friday that fits that week’s predetermined theme, post and compare two or more different covers available for that book, then name your favorite. A list of future weeks’ themes are available at Lynn’s Book Blog.
This week’s theme is:
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
~ a cover that is PSYCHEDELIC
Mogsy’s Pick:
The Hike by Drew Magary
For a psychedelic cover, I turned to a psychedelic book. I’m still pretty sure any attempt to summarize The Hike will sound like the mad ramblings of someone on a bad acid trip. The protagonist is Ben, a suburban middle-aged family man who takes a business trip up to rural Pennsylvania and books himself into his hotel. Before heading out to his dinner meeting though, he decides to explore around the area with a short hike. He sets off into the nearby woods, following a path he has chosen. Before long, he is beset upon by hulking man wearing the skinned-off face of a dog as a mask. Then there are more of them after him. Ben ends up running away, stumbling upon a campsite among the trees, and suddenly he is in his twenties again, staring into the face of his old college girlfriend. They sleep together and Ben wakes up. He’s back to his normal thirty-eight-year-old self again, with all his correct memories. But he’s still in the woods, and the girl is gone. All that’s left is a note at the empty camp which reads: “Stay on the path, or you will die.”
Oh, Ben stays on the path, all right. Along the way, he meets a talking crab, who lends him help. Then he’s kidnapped by a man-eating giantess named Fermona, who forces him to fight Rottweiler-men and dwarves in her gladiatorial arena. Soon, he is given a mission: to find someone known as The Producer, supposedly the creator of this crazy world he’s found himself in.
Let’s take a look at the covers:
From left to right, top to bottom: Viking (2016) – Penguin Books (2017) – Thorndike Press (2017) – Chinese Edition (2017)
Winner:
Slim pickings this week, and I’m not really a fan of any of them so the winner is automatically the version I own, the Viking hardcover!
But what do you think? Which is your favorite?
The BiblioSanctum 
Oh my that sounds like a trip. Literally lol. Okay the covers. 🙂 I like the first one but I kinda like the Chinese one too. The Thorndike edition caught my eye with those colors though…
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This is a CRAAAAAZY book!
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Yeah I’d go with the Viking Cover as well.
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I think it’s the cleanest, and most interesting 🙂
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Haha what is this book, it sounds completely insane! I like the Viking cover and the chinese one! My least favorite one is the one by Penguin.
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Yeah, I remember I had trouble describing it in my review, lol. It was just completely whacky.
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Oh they’re fun! I like the one you chose!
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Thanks, I’m quite fond of it too 🙂
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That does sound like quite a trip. I admit I’m on the edge about reading this – we will see. I think I’m partial to the Penguin books cover but I agree, none of that are that great.
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It’s definitely not a book for everyone, but if you like “weird” books, this one is perfect 😀
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I like the Viking edition and the Chinese edition best. This was a great choice, it seemed like a pretty tough theme this week!
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Yeah, if it hadn’t been for this one, I don’t think I would have had another cover to feature 😛
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I really wanted to like the Chinese edition best, but there is something about that makes me feel like it isn’t polished up all the way… But I’m actually going to go with the Penguin cover, ever so slightly ending out the Viking.
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I know what you mean about the Chinese edition. It almost looks based on the Viking, like someone might have just cut and pasted elements to a new template 😛
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Oh, I remember well your review for this one, and how totally WEIRD it sounded – not that I believe that weird is bad, of course… 😀 For a psychedelic cover you found the perfect book!
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Haha, sometimes “weird” can be bad for me. But somehow this one worked 😀
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Thorndike Press edition would be my pick, but they are all very great choices! 🙂
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That one’s an interesting one!
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Oh this is another stormingly good choice for this week’s theme – I was really struggling to find a suitable book for this one. While there isn’t a cover here I dislike, I am a tad more drawn to the bottom left, which is really lovely.
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I do love the colors used for that one!
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It’s funny that we both went for this one. I considered going for an old style sci fi cover because some of them are definitely trippy but I liked this so much that I can’t resist highlighting it at every opportunity.
Lynn 😀
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